Ivor Novello Rising award nominated, Athens-based Dublin artist Lullahush (AKA Daniel McIntyre) returns with a new album` Ithaca` this month following on from his 2024 EP `An Todchaí`. The new album sees Lullahush exploring the discourse between tradition and innovation and explores how a holistic marriage of traditional Irish music and contemporary electronica can express a unique perspective on modern Irish identity. `Ithaca` is famous as the home of Odysseus, and symbolises the return to the haven, the discovery and the fulfillment.
The album opens with the cry of a curlew before leading into Sean-nós singer Saileog Ní Cheannabháin’s haunting delivery of “An Droighneán Donn” (The Blackthorn Bush). Sean-nós singing is unaccompanied, traditional Irish vocal music usually performed in the Irish language. The latter part of this track has a skewed electronic soundscape added to the vocal delivery. In `Maggie na bhFlaitheas` (Maggie of the Heavens) there was a reel or folk dance tune melded with an electronic resonance and vocalised samples some of a religious slant. I loved the tin whistle which had a delightfully captivating ambience. It brought to mind The wonderful Afro Celt Sound System, when I first heard them back in the mid to late nineties at a Fleadh in London.
Maija Sofia’s voice flows through “Jimmy An Chladaigh” (Jimmy of the Shore) which while it is at times dreamy has some angular soundbites synced throughout. There`s flute hues and Gaelic vocalised segments meshed with electronic noise throughout `Maija an Uisce` (Maija of the Water) which has some bodhrán beats in the dying embers of the number. At times, the piece felt like a sea shanty of sorts.
`Maddy na Farraige” (Maddy Of The Sea) has an almost spiritual feel at times with a drum and bass beat spliced in as it progressed. I read that the number reimagined the maritime longing of The Grey Funnel Line (a nickname among Navy sailors for the Royal Navy) as a contemporary Garage workout. We have an evocative submission with “Kitty na Gaoithe” (Kitty of the Wind), a haunting deconstructed techno interpretation of Irish keening (a funeral singing tradition). It also included some percussive hues and other sounds that had a kind of oriental ambience.
`Dónal na Gealaí` (Daniel of the Moon) is fairly innovative and experimental which blends uneven samples of spoken word, noises, tones with a whistled version of the folk tune `Rare Auld Maintain Dew` from the late Eighteen hundreds running throughout and ending with waves washing against a shore. This number melds into `Máire na Réiltíní` (Mary of the Little Stars), inspired by Odysseus Elitis’ Maria Nefeli and layered with captured moments of an ephemeral affair. There`s some enticing poetic verses, an ethereal haunting flute segment and almost religious scripture shared in the final residues of the track.
We close out with `Raglan Road` which was built around a WhatsApp voice note of the artist’s 97-year-old great uncle Jack singing the Patrick Kavanagh poem, interwoven with the artist’s own voice. A song of a romance that ultimately failed and is a poem and song that will tear at your heartstrings.
`Ithaca` is a release where Daniel McIntyre explores his own odyssey with him now living in Europe as a result of his homeland becoming “economically uninhabitable.” “I miss it, but I have a difficult relationship with it” says McIntyre. “‘Ithaca’ is where Odyssus is trying to get back to in the Odyssey — my search for a sense of home since leaving has made me think about what Ithaca means. Maybe it’s not a place, maybe it’s a series of circumstances, maybe it’s something internal, maybe it’s something you carry around with you.”
`Ithaca` is fairly experimental, exploratory, and probing with some unconventional, offbeat, and unorthodox passages and soundscapes but at the same time pretty innovative and compelling.
An enjoyable listen regardless of your familiarity with the Irish diaspora, which indeed fuelled my parents’ emigration to England in the nineteen fifties.
Rating 9/10
