An Outsides Comes In From The Cold

“I don’t really see it as an album,” says reclusive Dublin ‘non-musician’ Stano of his Enoesque new release, Unknown Distance. “I just see it as part of a body of work that I’m building. It’s always evolving, and I’m never sure what’s around the corner.”

Born John Denver Stanley in Artane, Dublin in 1960, Stano is regarded by many as the original Irish indie experimentalist. His wonderfully titled 1983 debut, Content To Write In I Dine Weathercraft, proved just a little too out-there for local audiences, but had an impact in Europe and elsewhere. Although he’s subsequently released a steady stream of eclectic albums and EPs, he parted company with the mainstream music business in the mid-‘90s.
A skilled carpenter and visual artist as well, he’s been keeping himself busy dividing his energies between the three disciplines.
“I’m a carpenter by trade,” he explains. “Painting has gone well for me over the last few years, and paid for my studio. I move between the three of them. One takes over for a while and then I move to something else.
“I don’t really see the difference between the three of them,” he continues. “It’s like if you get a beautiful piece of wood. Once you cut into it, the grain starts coming out in different shapes and different colours. It’s the same with the music. They’re all interlinked.”
He’s never been officially diagnosed, but Stano realised a few years ago that he has synaesthesia – a neurological condition that causes him to ‘see’ music as shapes and colours. In his case, it’s more of a blessing than a curse.
“I was never aware of it until someone pointed it out to me a few years ago. I see sounds as shapes or colours. Odd little shapes and quirky things. I’d be describing a sound as a ‘dark sound’ or a ‘bright sound’ or a ‘sparkly sound’. When I’d be describing a sparkly sound – which could be a harmonica and a guitar or something – I’d see it as a yellow sound. It’s funny when I’m listening to music with my sound engineer, I tell him the shape of a guitar line and he tries to interpret what I’m saying. And I don’t know what I want until I actually hear it, so I’m searching all the time.”
Always busy, Stano is currently midway through recording no less than three separate albums with different collaborators. He’s just finished producing an EP for Temper-Mental MissElayneous and is about to work on a project with Lethal Dialect.
Having hand-built his own analogue studio, his recording methods are quite unusual. Any sound, no matter how it’s made, is grist to his musical mill.
“I layer and layer everything. Sometimes four or five different bass guitars on one track. A lot of the time someone will come in and he would play guitar for maybe a minute or two, and I’d take 10 seconds. Another guy, I’d take a minute of. Somebody else might come in and make a weird noise plugging in the jack, and that would wind up on the track.”
It doesn’t really matter who’s making the sound, either.
“My local postman knocked on my door one day and told me could play bass. So he’s been on the last few albums.”
Preferring to remain in the shadows, Stano hasn’t performed on a stage in more than 20 years, but will emerge on Friday October 18 at Meeting House Square in Temple Bar for the world premiere of Unspoken, his audio-visual tribute to his native city.
The 40-minute performance represents the fruits of his collaborations with acclaimed guitarists Sean Coleman (EELS, Mark Eitzel) and Dutch jazz-player Jeen Rabs (Ray Charles, Harry Connick). A visual-heavy show, Unspoken, dedicated to the memory of late photographer and filmmaker Brendan Bourke, may well be the Dubliner’s most ambitious project to date.
“The performance will begin with slow, dreamy, atmospheric music, accompanied by expansive shots of Dublin,” he explains. “We drive through the nighttime city and head out to the Dublin mountains, the countryside is presented in abstract images as we speed by the heather and bog cotton in the early morning light. Our abstract journey through the mountains brings us crashing back to the city presented as a wild landscape as the lights and laser beams envelope the audience.”