Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.
The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April - resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.
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What did the poet say?
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil
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Dancersend was incandescent last week.
And then, the other day, driving past the station and through those four or five fields of rape (such an unfortunate name) I was floored, overawed, by the flaming fluorescence of yellow stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see.
A vibrancy of hue I've never seen before.
This photo - of a different field, at a less bright time of day - doesn't nearly do it justice.
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And of course the bluebell woods - again, so hard to capture on camera, the gaseousness of that peak-bloom purple haze.
So - even though the birdsong is our surroundsound symphony these days - we turn now to musical happenings of note in the parish.
From our Emerald Isle twin town Kilkenny, something really special:
Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 3 - The Stray Sod.
The latest - and last - installment of the compilation series documenting this Irish institution for electronic music composers active in the 1970s and 1980s.
But what a way to go out - it's a gorgeously varied selection of pieces, ranging from miniature electronic radio-plays to tone poems woven out of chimes and drones to dulcet folk songs.
You can buy it here either as a digital download or as a compact disc that comes with a beautifully illustrated and intricately informative 70-page book about the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory's history, a pull-out A3 poster of the Ireland Pavilion Expo '74, a Radagast's Allotment Macpaint design by Johnny Donnelly, and a special thank you letter from the Label Director.
Release irrationale:
In this third, and final, volume of the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology, we focus on several disparate yet conceptually linked topics, many of which connect to the Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom, who have been briefly mentioned in previous volumes. The first half of the book focuses largely on the foundations which led to the events of the second half. The second half of the book will focus largely on the arts, crafts and lifestyle collective founded by the Kielys, Radagast’s Allotment.
In our first chapter we cover the creation and publication of the 1971 children’s book and accompanying audio cassette Upon the Air. Written and produced by Gerry Duggan and Jacinta Delaney and illustrated by the renowned Irish equine artist Johnny ‘Ding Dong’ Donnelly, Upon the Air, was the first and only children’s book made in the lab. It was intended to disseminate Delaney’s early-years sound studies research to a wider audience, though was a commercial failure.
The second chapter of the book covers an ill-fated, government funded, immersive art installation which had been planned for the Irish pavilion at the 1974 World’s Expo in Spokane, Washington, U.S.A. In this chapter we cover the development of the installation, which was a collaboration between K.E.R.L. founding member, Eoghan Comerford and the Dublin-based artist duo Beamish and Watson. We also explore the government in-fighting which led to the ultimate failure of the project.
Chapter three documents the musical works of the Kilkenny folklorist and composer Maeve Scully (1947-2011), her connection to the Radagast’s Allotment and K.E.R.L., and the rediscovery of her work by a younger generation of composers, musicians and improvisers throughout the world. Maeve would go on to become a key member in Radagast’s Allotment and would frequently make use of the facilities in the Electroacoustic Lab to realise her ‘Mayday Dew’ series of compositions.
The radio adaptation of T.V. Delaney’s, post-apocalyptic ecological science fiction novel The Capsules of Posterity – The Aurochs, is the topic of our fourth chapter. Initially published in ’76 by Tamhóg Press, the book was adapted into a radio play by Antrim Productions and K.E.R.L. It was produced by Tony Quinn, Tom Kiely and Eoghan Comerford and broadcast in 1981. The production process of this adaptation is often cited as the origin for the ideas which later became the formalised Radagast’s Allotment.
At this halfway point of the book, we have included several pages from the first edition of the Radagast’s Allotment Almanac, which came out in the summer of ’85 and was designed by Johnny Donnelly using MacPaint. It gives an insight into the activities and interests of the group, which we will then explore in the second half of the book.
Next, we have an interview which I conducted in a pub in London with the Radagast’s Allotment founding member, Owen Kiely, last year, where we talked at length about Dian Cécht and his band after Dian Cécht, The Triskelion. Owen does not suffer fools lightly, though we have printed the interview in full as it gives an insight into the culture and condition which led up the founding and eventual collapse of Radagast’s Allotment and the Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory.
In chapter six we cover the activities of the Radagast’s Allotment, an arts, crafts and lifestyle organisation described by Hannah Sheppard-Noonan, in her book Bards, Binaural Beats, and Borderline Personality Disorder – Mental Illness in a Rural Arts Community as showing ‘all the signs of being a new religious movement, though lacked anyone with basic, never mind effective, organisational skills, which fundamentally prevented the group from fully actualising into a cult.’
Socracht Rothlach, which was a collaboration between one of the guitarists from The Triskelion, Stevie Larkin, and the K.E.R.L. member Packie Bolger, is the topic of chapter seven. The release was the second in K.E.R.L.’s Relaxation Series and was, like most things released by the lab, a commercial failure. In the chapter we cover the process of making the album, its musical qualities and the life and death of Stevie Larkin.
Our final chapter is about Tom Kiely and his group The Small Green Hand, who had splintered off from Radagast’s Allotment in the mid-80s, and who, inspired by Italian Futurists and the Viennese Actionists, attempted to poison a significant amount of the Kilkenny public in an attempt to ‘herald a new Irish techno-feudal utopia.’
Vivere Solem Et Oppositum,
Neil P. Quigley
April ‘26
It would be a shame if they were so coy about it that Inferno didn't get the attention it probably merits.
