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Launch of "Haunted By Silence" in CMC

Launched by Bernard Clarke Lyric FM and Yvonne Ferguson Director Contemporary Music Centre Tuesday 2nd December

We are delighted to announce -

Haunted By Silence by Danny McCarthy is now available on CD & Digital formats

You can listen and purchase here:
farpoint.bandcamp.com/album/haunted-by-silence

The hypnotic 47-minute composition was inspired by McCarthy's deep listening experiences at St. Mary's Abbey, Glencairn, home to Ireland’s only Cistercian nuns, whose life is centered on silence. He recorded the unique, indeterminate sounds inspired by the Abbey's wood contracting as the heating system cools down in the evening. McCarthy weaves these field recordings and sounds from found objects to reflect both his practice of deep listening and his sublime compositional skills.

The release is enhanced by two specially commissioned essays: one by renowned sound artist David Toop and another by Sr Eleanor Campion, a Cistercian nun from the Abbey.

Here are Bernard's words

There have been many technological innovations in music since 1945, but one of the most important aesthetic innovations has been in new ideas that focus on listening.

People like Pierre Schaeffer proposed the idea of reduced listening – a method in which sound is listened to for its own sake as a sound object, removed from its source-Denis Smalley took this even further into the realms odf Spectromorphology. John Cage invited listeners to hear any sound as music-very profound when the listener listens as intently as the creating artist.

And Pauline Oliveros encouraged listeners to actively experience all sounds through a practice she described as “deep listening” -even more profound, though it requires discipline and practice.

These ideas all contributed to contemporary music’s focus on the experience of sound itself.

But that is music, and music is not sound, or rather, music is only one part of sound.

Danny McCarthy’s compositions and installations make use of sounds that are often the results of acoustic phenomena. His installation work focuses our attention and perception on the physical presence of sound interacting within a particular space.

Some of these spaces start to “play” us. Take The Memory Room. I witnessed two installation versions of this: the first in a very small space, almost confessional, at the Hilltown Festival of New Music; the second in The Guesthouse in Cork city.

In both spaces, one had to interact with the space of the installation itself. And nothing has eclipsed that sunny afternoon in Hilltown, or that cloudy morning in Cork. And a CD player, a record player, a streaming phone, an iPad or a computer is not an installation space -and never will be either.

The mid 1970s. To Stevie Wonder and his two-LP set entitled Songs in the Key of Life. Take the song called Sir Duke, a tribute to the musical geniuses that held special relevance for Stevie Wonder-people like Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington. Sir Duke, the song, opens with the line, Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.

When I discovered this album as a teenager in the late 1980s, I had no understanding of the cultural significance of Stevie Wonder or the jazz greats he celebrated. I knew nothing of aesthetics as a philosophical method, nor how to distinguish music from other types of sound. But I did know that Stevie Wonder was right:

You can feel it all over/I could feel it all over.

It lit a fire in me, as it has in many others, with questions like these:

What is music? Why do we make it? What does it mean? Why do we think it means anything? If it does mean something, is that meaning a property of the music itself, or do we, as listeners, somehow put meaning into it?

These are ancient questions, nothing original from me here.

For this CD release, I am going to focus on questions that circle around the idea of music’s meaning-or very much in this case, outside of the tinkling bells, pure sound. Does sound mean anything?

III

Music and meaning are related. Sound and meaning are related, but that is where the consensus ends. For on the one hand, we have those who believe that meaning is a property within sound itself, existing independently of any listener.

And on the other -we have those who believe that meaning is a quality that is somehow attached to sound by the listener.

Titles…

Sound art does occasionally come wrapped in evocative titles or descriptive phrases. They seem to speak directly; they even seem to offer a means of ordering the mysteries of sound.

Haunted by Silence.

Yet titles are so/so. In Radio, we tend to seize on titles as hooks on which to hang our explanations, easily overlooking the wall on which they are fixed in the first place.

We are in danger then of seizing on the tile as an explanation -and this then becomes an “explanation” of the work?

Haunted by Silence.

If sound or music are about themselves, what of those works whose titles make suggestive connections between the music and something else, like the evocative titles Debussy gave his Preludes? What of them?

Should the listener copy Debussy’s practice and consider the title only after listening to the work?

Haunted by Silence.

Or is the object, person, situation, or mood something that is wholly embodied in the work itself?

Haunted by Silence…

Today our culture, our media, our society is profoundly alienating -it’s a combination of distraction and addiction. We live in a world dominated by noise and ceaseless chatter, and silence is often feared. Yet a work like Haunted By Silence challenges all of this: it posits a space of potential, a canvas on which meaning and interpretation can be projected.

Whether it evokes peace or unease is up to the listener

This cd set from Farpoint Recordings (with notes from David Toop, and Sister Eleanor Campion) hint at a retreat, inner reflection, or even divine connection. Conversely, they also hint at loneliness or isolation.

That said, neither the artist nor the label proscribes how one should listen to the album.

Nearly all releases, no matter what the genre, adhere to a set of rhythms, changes and chord-melodies, with musicians employing techniques that range from fairly relaxed to jaw-dropping. The style also relies on repetition.

Haunted by Silence has repetition, but it is more to do with a haunting than a measuring of beats or musical time. Danny McCarthy has broken the mould here once again.

If there’s a pathway here, it is one’s own, earned on one’s own through listening.

As to the artist, I think there might be variation and improvisation, but Danny McCarthy’s listening is his own, full of twists and turns, with influences from outside the piece at times -maybe- but not tethered to any of them. The real danger for the listener comes in whether they are listening to Danny McCarthy listening, or whether their own listening is unfolding in front of them -one of the great sphinxes that is Haunted by Silence.

This is about as inner-driven as it gets. Because Danny McCarthy does not cycle through the signposts, signifiers and techniques that are familiar to the ear, it takes focus to listen to this album. Our learned tendency to categorize things — in order to understand, appreciate and enjoy — is absolutely useless here.

Which makes this album a challenge, one that is at turns confounding and engrossing, disconcerting and comforting-but ultimately rewarding.

You can feel it all over/I could feel it all over.

Just listen, this artist has regularly said, just listen…