The Dublin based multi-instrumentalist composer, field recordist, and sound designer has just released a wonderful new album which takes the sound of the bodhran to a new technical level.
Ian Nyquist‘s Gilded is my favourite album of the year. It was both an utter surprise and a total revelation, and a balm for some burnout I’d been experiencing. An album centred around the bodhrán, but with ingenuity and technology expands the most traditional of instruments into a wild and brilliant array of sounds.
Ambient, melodic, not quite electronic, with some spellbinding features from Pogues alumni Iona Zajac and Sean Nós singer Lorcán Mac Mathúna, it is a beautiful collection of sounds you have certainly never heard before. Ian was good enough to brave a bar with an impressively bad soundsystem to shed some light on this dazzling mystery he has created.
Gilded follows the equally remarkable Black Earth Cairn, which takes a similarly radical and unconventional sound design approach to the bass guitar. How did you go about devising this wild approach you have to the bodhrán?
It’s been a theme of “Let me see how far I can extend the possibility of this instrument”. Things like the bodhrán and the bass guitar, looking at them, you kind of have an idea of what they’ll sound like. I think part of me was coming from a place of not being sure how to approach those instruments in a conventional way. So it wasn’t really even for the sake of trying to be different, but more finding ways that I could get unique sounds out of them.
That’s what led to my use of the bodhrán in this. It is a rhythm instrument, but it has so much melodic potential. When you hear a bodhrán solo, the way that it’s played, it does have, like, its own melody to it and everything, the way that you can bend and shape the skin.
I wanted to expand upon that somehow. Experimenting with different ways that I could bring out this melodic component of the instrument. It’s difficult to think of what the moment was for me, kind of cracking that nut. There was a video that I saw of a Ukrainian tap dancer, Volodymyr Shpudeiko, who had a performance with a modular synth composer called Hainali.
He set up a platform for someone to dance on, and it would be triggering different notes from his setup. So it was this weird and mesmerizing combination of rhythm and then also extra sound that you wouldn’t really expect. That was a bridge between experimentation and having the basis of the body of work. I made contact with Ed Devane, a sound artist and engineer who makes contact microphones, to try and get this all together. When I finally got it, I started messing around with different ways that I can change the sound of the bodhrán, through modeling software. It’s a long answer for your question.
Did you play bodhrán before you embarked on this reinvention?
It was something I’ve always admired and something that I’ve always wanted to pick up. I never really intended to play a trad instrument, make a trad album or anything like that. But it was such a new way of playing for me, and such a new way of making music for me.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it happened at the same time that I was letting go of things, unhealthy habits, a lot of things that didn’t really have a place in my life anymore, things that I needed to release myself from.
In that sort of change as a person, you, of course, have a lot of time to spend with your thoughts. I spent most of that time making this and experimented with something that felt like new territory. So, as I say, I never went out and thought, okay, I’m gonna make a trad or a trad adjacent album. It kind of just fell into that zone and I think it’s kind of beautifully wrapped up in a full circle, that I’ve ended up with what feels like an homage to a scene that I always considered myself to be outside of.
Words: Leroy Tanner
Images: Claire Nash
Gilded is out now and available to purchase at annyquist.bandcamp.com
