Revelling / Reckoning: Ailís Ní Ríain on her debut album

We began having conversations about this release back in 2018. A pandemic and several lockdowns later, here we are, finally, it is about to be released. The Last Time I Died  is an album which includes music spanning the past twenty years of my compositional work. The focus is primarily on small scale, chamber work. Up to relatively recently most of my concert output was for these forces; the theatre, intimacy and nuance of the small-scale has always appealed.

Revelling/Reckoning is a sextet for five wind and percussion composed during the early days of Covid lockdown. It is performed by Dame Evelyn Glennie and the New London Chamber Ensemble. I was drawn to a two-movement form in which the shadows and light of gesture, opposites and the infernal pull to surmise our experiences infused my approach to writing the work. Neatly encapsulated by songwriter Ani DiFranco as:

The piece is a reflection on opposite but connected forces that make up all aspects and phenomena of life. Revelling is dense, vivacious and playful with puckish percussive commentaries with a breathless energy. Reckoning is a slow, murky and mysterious series of utterances submerged within the eerie water-phone.  

In 2021 I travelled to Cambridge to work with Evelyn where we discussed percussive instrumentation. Naturally, she has a vast collection, however, it was clear from the outset that a ‘small, transportable’ set up was most ideal - something deft and nimble, metal and resounding. We worked back and forth, on and off for about a year honing and revisiting the piece alongside the New London Chamber Ensemble leading to the recording in 2022.

Photos from the recording session with Evelyn Glennie and the New London Chamber Ensemble conducted by Darren Bloom at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge.

Thank You is a short work for guitar and cimbalom taken from a long-form music-theatre piece Brief-Blue-Electric-Bloom [2009/10] in which I wrote the text and music. The work features video animation, two sign-language performers, live music and text. Tim Williams and Tom McKinney premiered the work in Manchester. 

The piece explores the theme of relationship and communication breakdown and misunderstanding between people either perceived, notational or ‘real’. We present a delicate, challenging world where sign begin and music completes every sentence, where we strive, through difference, to communicate our desires, dreams and deviants.

I have multiple hearing impairments including hearing loss and wanted to create a work which embeds interpretive sign-language within a work combining poetry, animation and contemporary music. My aim, to enable a deaf audience and ‘disable’ a hearing audience so that we might ‘receive’ the work equally.
 

Many people have been involved in the making of this body of work. My sincere thanks to all at NMC for their patience and care and to all the musicians, engineers, funders and friends who enable us all to continue to create work.

This article was originally published in our Friends' Newsletter. Alongside articles like this, our quarterly Friends Newsletter is packed with behind-the-scenes updates on recordings and education projects, as well as invitations to see our work in action plus opportunities to meet composers and artists; find out more about becoming a Friend here.

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