When Irish electronic artist Lullahush, aka Daniel McIntyre, steps into the Hot Press offices, he’s only hours removed from playing his highly anticipated special guest slot for ROÍS in the Workman’s Club – his first ever gig under his current moniker, he tells me.  But looking ahead to the sold-out show, he's calm – and “just happy to have gotten out of carrying the gear,” he jokes.

“We've figured out this way of playing where I can do things the lads don't know are going to happen,” Daniel says. “So I'm going to just play it by ear.”

Also on the horizon are a series of summer dates.

"We haven't fully decided yet what we're going to do, and might not even decide until it's happening,” McIntyre muses. “We wanted to find a way of playing live that we can bring chaos and risk into. Because a lot of the time, when you go see electronic music live, it's super-boring. It was our dream to find a way to play that had a possibility for failure. So we've figured out a pretty complicated way of doing things, that keeps things alive.”

The artist says it himself: he’s not a seasoned live act, or even an avid gig-goer – yet he’s approaching this upcoming series of shows with unapologetic excitement.

“My favourite thing to do is just sit in a room and make music,” McIntyre admits. “You have all of the control and the power, and you can make things as perfect as you want them. You just relinquish all of that when you play live. I've done things before, playing with other people and running tracks for them live, and that's the way of having perfection if you want to have it.

"But it's kind of soulless, so we were like, ‘We have to go the complete opposite direction.’ We have to go for total chance, total chaos, and go back to the rawest version of things. And then remake everything live, in a way that no two things will ever be the same. I try to find a way to access a kind of chaos in electronic music, where you're hitting human fragility.”

Lullahush’s most recent record, Ithaca, is his first release with the label Future Classic, best known for signing electronic heavy-hitters like the legendary Sophie. Speaking of this experience, Daniel immediately mentions label-head Nathan McLay, and how much guidance he offered during the writing process.

“My first album was a pretty lonely process," he reflects. "So it's nice to be able to feel like I was surrounded.”

How much of a difference did it make?

“I actually found this one easier, because I was a bit less precious,” Daniel says. “For my first album, I was just blinkered, wanting it to be absolutely perfect. And then it didn't really do anything when it came out. So I had to learn to be like, ‘Alright, why are you doing this?’ I had a lot more fun making this album, it was a lot more freeing.”

On Ithaca, Lullahush engages in the delicate process of blending new and old – fresh, innovative electronic music and traditional Irish sounds. How does he reconcile those seemingly conflicting concepts?

“It's about how you approach the traditional stuff,” Daniel explains. “If you actually look a bit closer and try to understand what's going on, it's actually quite easy to find a way to hold it, in the context of contemporary electronica and production methods.

“In trad, there's a lot that lends itself to being treated in this way. It's just about carefully weaving the two together and making sure the electronic stuff is serving the material, rather than just mashing them together for the sake of it.”

Lullahush. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

I ask how, exactly, he navigates this juxtaposition.

“With something like monophonic instruments,” he clarifies, “like on the track ‘Máire na Réiltíní’, for example, there's a flute that's just a beautiful melody – it's a beautiful tone and it's beautifully played. So I would build from that – use those three aspects of beauty and then enhance them.

“My first thing is usually, I would re-harmonise the piece. So I can re-tune the audio, and then you've got this kind of chorus. All of a sudden, you’ve got this monophonic instrument becoming a polyphonic, big thing, and it all comes out of itself. This is how this electronic stuff can serve the tradition, because that's something you can never do with a band. You can just grow this thing, this seed into an expansive, huge version of itself.

“With the traditional stuff, so much of the music itself is inspired by the landscape and the natural beauty of Ireland. Like the stories of areas that have been carried on the wind – people have heard them. It really naturally folds into being treated in this way, if you just can be careful with it.”

The record also explores the idea of home, pride and belonging – themes that hit close to home from McIntyre, who left Dublin to live in Athens, Greece. He explains the duality between the deep Irishness of his sound and his own exile.

“I think you have to have the perspective to be able to articulate it properly," he considers. "I don't think I would be able to make that album here. You see that a lot in the history of Irish art. A lot of the great modern articulations of Irishness are usually said from a distance. There's also a type of Irishness I wanted to articulate, which I feel I haven't really heard in the way people have approached electronic music in Ireland before. But I needed to sit alone and far away to be able to think about it properly.

When I ask to clarify what type of Irishness he is talking about, Daniel explains, “Where we're at right now, the cultural voice that we have – it's taken a while for us to get here and have the confidence to speak the way we speak. We’ve grown more sure of ourselves in the things that we make and present to the world. We shake off stereotypes, or even our own self-deprecation, and kind of embrace this unique thing that we have, without having to have a caveat of putting ourselves down about it.

"That’s not to say that we can't do it with humour, but I feel as though we're no longer trying to copy anything else or be anything else other than ourselves. We're seeing some really amazing art come out of that.”

On top of his own connection to Irish trad, Lullahush makes his music into a rich tapestry by using collections of samples he has spent months, or even years collecting, ranging from conversations with friends to WhatsApp voice messages.

“I'm just constantly making a mental archive of what I have, where I know who sent me what," he says. "And then I think people have actually become a bit weird about sending me voice messages... I used to be quite bad with that, like I would have my phone hidden.”

Does he find any uneasiness in this incredible amount of vulnerability?

“There were some pieces I did sort of agonise over, because there's some very personal stuff in there,” he nods. “There's a lot of stuff that's hidden. I kind of like the idea of it being this secret map as well: if anybody chooses to go very deeply into it, there's a lot to discover. There's the ones that are on the surface, obvious, and then there's layers within.

“I don't see it so much with electronic music, and often there's an emphasis on the clean and the perfect. But I think what's interesting about using these methods is you can actually create a much more intimate sensation. And you can build a vast expanding world, but it can also feel like it's a very close, personal thing.

“There's kind of a safety there,” Daniel concludes, “because I'm making a very personal statement anyway, so it's like doubling down a bit. Just being like, ‘Look, I stand behind this. Here I am, within it.’”