Rustic Development

Electronic music is historically the sound of the city – from Pierre Henri and Pierre Schaeffer in a laboratory in Paris, through Karleinz Stockhausen being ‘difficult’ in Cologne, to the Belleville Three rocking Detroit. The countryside on the other hand always resonated with more ‘organic’ instruments – banjos, mandolins, accordions and fiddles. However, electro-popster Ken McHugh is in raptures about his move to the countryside and it’s making me question some of my previously held notions about music and place (goddamnit, I hate questioning things!).

“It’s brilliant here,” he gushes. “You can go to the beach, go for a walk, go for a run, do a bit of writing. And the colours around Wicklow are so vibrant. It makes you want to write a certain way. And it gives you lots of space to think, and I think that came out in the record.”
Suddenly, I can picture all our ancestors gathered around the fire with Theremins, ominichords, patch-bays, effects-racks, and laptops (all of which are strewn liberally around the McHugh abode, alongside mandolins, harmoniums, guitars, drum-kits). It’s not such a jump for McHugh, from folk to the technological.
“I spent years playing trad and folk with my family,” he explains. “Every summer and every Christmas we’d be booked to play here or play there and it was amazing, because otherwise I think I’d just have been hanging around the chipper. And it was really, really good – and I suppose if it’s coming out in the music it’s a good thing. Although Irish people don’t tend to notice it in my music, Americans will sometimes mention my ‘Celtic roots’ coming through.”
McHugh is most definitely an electronic artist, but there’s something pastoral and folksy about his new collection of sunny pop, and he puts a lot of this down to location.
“I’m not turning into a hippy,” he laughs, after I point my finger at him and level the accusation. “But I am trying to get into a relaxed state of mind in general. There’s so much going on in the world that you do need to inject yourself every now and again, because you can really get caught up with meaningless things in the city. You can get caught up in rat races, and there’s so much going on all the time that there isn’t time to stop and think. And if you’ve grown up in the city maybe you’re used to it, but I grew up in a farm in County Mayo and I moved to Dublin for years, and I think it was just time to return to that for a while. And I love the city. I love the inspiration of the city, but for where I was in my life, I’d kind of broken-up a relationship, and I thought it was time to move down and really get stuck into my music.”
And McHugh had a clear notion of where he wanted to take this record.
“Well actually, with every record I have a clear concept,” he states. “I always start by saying ‘this time I’m making a purely instrumental album’ and by the end of it I have a batch of songs. I love working with people like Carol Keogh because she’s so talented – she can come in and bring so much to the music. Maybe I’ll do the instrumental album by album number seven? But this time was different again because I did have a concept. I wanted to rein in Autamata a little bit. I love the other albums but I think there was a lot to take in – all the jumping from one idea to the next. So for this one I wanted it to be a bit more tied in and have a theme. I wanted to make a real upbeat, summery, colourful record. Something that was major rather than minor. And sometimes it’s hard to do that because minor chords can have such an emotional content. It’s hard to write upbeat tunes all the time.”
The difficulty he had is brought into relief when he reveals that his favourite artists are Brian Wilson (representing the light and upbeat) and David Lynch, the confusing, beautiful-genius film-maker behind films like Mullholand Drive, Lost Highway and Eraserhead. McHugh talks passionately about Lynch as an artist with a strong vision. However, if Lynch is an influence, this record must have been influenced by Lynch’s most feelgood work – The Straight Story.
Like Lynch, McHugh has strong opinions about art and art production. McHugh thinks that technology is both helping artists to achieve their vision at a fraction of the price and hindering by removing some of the effort.
“I learned to produce by splicing tape,” he says. “And I still like to use my old samplers because it takes a bit longer. Now you can go into a shop, buy a bit of equipment and you’re quickly making music that sounds quite good. But I think you’re losing some of the basic grounding – old school things like miking technique and getting a good performance are being lost. When I had my commercial studio, you’d get these young fellows coming in who couldn’t sing and would just go ‘sure can’t you auto-tune it?’ You can fuck off!”
In the studio there’s a platinum record for his work on David Kitt’s The Big Romance, and for years he ran Pulse Studios – a commercial set-up in the midst of the rat-race he just escaped. Recently he’s worked with Juno Falls and Ian Whitty – mellow acoustic music in the mellow countryside. “A few years ago when I produced, before I’d made any records of my own, I think I really pushed my own sound on people,” he proffers. “It was a certain sound that’s in my own records now. But since I’ve been releasing my own albums, it’s a separate thing altogether. I’m very clear that this is their music. Recently a lot of the music I’ve produced has been very un-electronic. But it’s whatever the artist wants. My own records and my production are two quite separate things. Recently I’ve started thinking it’s time to look at artists from London or New York. Maybe it’d be cool to go and do a few electronic dance acts, and start producing that kind of stuff? But I don’t think there’s a lot of that in Ireland. Maybe I’ll go over to New York and work with the new Klaxons! Maybe bring them back here to the countryside?”
The most recent act McHugh has produced are a little lesser known – 40 hymn-singing children from the school where his sister teaches. Recorded for charity on the previous Saturday, and mixed, mastered and sent to the pressing plant by McHugh within days, it was made with old-school miking techniques in the friary in his hometown of Ballyhaunis.
“I was really getting goosebumps for parts of it,” he gushes. He plays me some of it and listens with the attention he’d give if he’d just recorded Madonna (it’s way better than anything Madonna’s done since the eighties by the way).
“I got to talk to them about recording, about miking techniques, about how Phil Spector used to do it. It was great. When I was a kid there was this guy called Jiving Ivan, who lived down the road and had a kind of one-man-band. And he influenced me to get my first guitar. One of these kids in the friary could be inspired to go and pursue music further. And that’s a great thing.”
So then we go to the beach to take some photos. It’s windswept and refreshing. There’s a dog. He (Ken, not the dog) shows me the stones he photographed for the inlay card of the album, then he heads home to ring some friends about rehearsing for the live show. On the windswept Wicklow beach, electronic folk music makes total sense. The new language of Éireann will be binary, the theremin will replace the harp as our national symbol, and in years to come Americans will come to Wicklow to look at old men in pubs playing stylaphones and Moogs. Let the electro-ruralism start here!

Colours Of Sound is out now on Lefthand Records