A Curious Compendium of Crooked Irish Tunes Vol 1

It’s safe to say that Dr Dave Flynn is something of an iconoclast. The composer and guitarist behind the Irish Memory Orchestra – a classical chamber orchestra that plays exclusively from memory – here unveils what is only the first volume of a series of ‘crooked tunes’ of his own invention.

A ‘crooked tune’, in the Irish folk tradition, is one in which the usual rhythm is purposely disrupted. It involves adding a few bars here, cutting a few bars there, all in the spirit of some mischievous musical sprite. Flynn has invented names for such tunes, such as ‘hop polkas’ and ‘clipped polkas’, ‘hop reels’, ‘jump jigs’, ‘clipped reels’ and ‘clipped mazurkas’. All these misshapen Irish folk tunes are composed by Flynn and played on the guitar, to the accompaniment of strange percussion such as a kettle hit with Mollard batons. Album closer, ‘Tuneberg’s Jig’, takes samples of the work of Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg and reimagines them as an Irish jig.

This is largely an album recorded in New Zealand, although ‘Errigal Suite’, a sprawling 14-minute concoction of four tunes was originally recorded in 2007 for the Guitar Festival of Ireland. Truly unusual instrumental guitar music.