Cuimhne Ghlinn: Explorations in Irish Music for Pedal Steel Guitar

Two worlds, two traditions, collide to enjoyable effect in David Murphy’s long-playing debut, Cuimhne Ghlinn, its Explorations in Irish Music for Pedal Steel Guitar subtitle offering explanation enough of point and purpose. Treating tunes that stretch from the legendary Turlough O’Carolan into the present, it provides new evidence of Irish traditional music’s seemingly endless facility to fuse with other idioms. If anything, we’re knee-deep in the still-forming territory of Cosmic Country and Cosmic Americana, the Irish accent more often than not understated. Humming with its distinctively songful and keening ‘twang’, Murphy’s evocative pedal steel voice is cosseted and couched in the subtlest of arrangements that variously incorporate harp, fiddle, uilleann pipes, cello, double bass, piano, trumpet and sensual, otherworldly electronic textures. Lead single ‘Citi na gCumann’ is a lament swathed in a synthesised, cotton-soft waltz. Like everything here, it’s an exercise in mood-setting and understated emotions; the timeless ‘Aisling Gheal’ a sonic experiment of narcotic enchantment; ‘Eleanor Plunkett’ blossoming with old world charm in luminous modernity. Eloquent support from a dozen others, notable among them Anthony Ruby, Laura McFadden, Graham Heaney, Steve Wickham, Rory McCarthy, Alannah Thornburgh and Cory Gray, is deftly woven together by the self-producing Murphy.