In The Meadows Festival 2024

The inaugural In The Meadows festival, a celebration of music from Ireland and beyond, on June 8 at The Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin, proves to be an epic and expansive day of sounds on the institution’s vast green lawns.

Proceedings begin with Mohammad Syfkhan’s Irish-influenced Kurdish buzuq music on the West Stage (one of three performance areas). The combination of heavy beats from a backing track with Syfkhan’s rapid-fire fingering, reverb and skipping, dancing vocals, swirl the tent into a meditative state.

Cormac Begley opens the main East Stage. On top of his talents as a concertina player, he’s a wonderful raconteur, interspersing tunes with stories of his wayward youth and explanations of his instrument’s construction. He plays a range of concertinas – from a rare bass to a tiny piccolo – always using the bellows to great effect; I find myself envisioning a breathless creature trapped in the instrument, huffing and puffing along with the tunes. Begley incorporates everything from dark, deep, grumbles to light-hearted, delicate whistles in his playing. Particularly moving is the air dedicated to his late uncle, Tommy O’Connor, which shares a melody with the well-known ‘Building Up and Tearing England Down’. His last tune is for the people of Palestine, with Begley shaking the concertina lightly to evoke an unsettling, heartfelt vibrato.

John Francis Flynn follows, his deep voice and songs dripping with distress are, as usual, utterly compelling, ‘My Son Tim’ in particular. Flynn gives the old song a relentless, inevitable rhythm while, towards the end, his bassist retunes in real time and sews mind-bending distortion around what’s left of the melody.

From the US, Andy the Doorbum performs his beautifully unsettling album, OF TEARS, NO AMOUNT CAN QUENCH MOUTHS MAIMED BY DROUGHT, on the Middle Stage. Written while grieving his late father, it’s filled with found sounds, Appalachian harmonies (featuring Lankum’s Radie Peat), heavy, distorted keys and strings, recreated here via a backing track. In a long white gown and horned, pagan-esque mask, Andy starts the show standing on a box with bicycle lights strapped to his hands, the lights turning on and off throughout. Eventually, he removes his visor, revealing a face painted white, with black around the eyes. Collapsing to the ground, he pulls his own hair out. Exhausting and heart-rending.

At points through the day, sound leaks between tents. Standing at the edge of the crowd for Rachel Lavelle, for example, it’s hard to hear the nuances of her synth-based style over the sound of Mogwai’s spiralling post-rock from the big stage. Hopefully, though, such problems will be resolved if the festival returns for a second year.

Lankum, who co-curated the event, close on the main stage. Welcomed by a screaming crowd, they have producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy performing with them for the first time. ‘The Pride of Petravor’’s dark, drone-riddled, distortion-heavy big band swing (with Daragh Lynch standing his guitar like a cello and sawing it with a bow) sends shivers. As does their rollicking, rhythmic ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’. Between songs, the group express joy at having such a big crowd (their biggest so far) at home and urge continued solidarity with Palestine. Cormac Begley joins them for ‘Master Crowley’s’. Its delightfully unsettling, passages of the song filled only by industrial-level clanging. The melody, however, thanks to some dark hypnotism, continues to dance eerily through the audience’s minds.

As festivalgoers walk reluctantly back through the hospital gates, you can hear hummed snatches of ‘Master Crowley’s’ mixed in with stories and sounds from the day’s events, snippets each person is trying to take home with them. A thrilling, unnerving and well-curated day of music.

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today