The Dashing Mr D’arcy

We go back quite some time with Mr. John D’Arcy Jr.

At our first meeting with the Lisburn musician, he was trailing a debut EP and waiting anxiously on his A-Level results. Said record seemed to reflect the personality of its creator to a tee: whip smart, good natured and bubbling with infectious optimism. The three-minute power pop vignettes that made up its substance – detailing the prat-falls of driving your first car, leaving school, falling in love – sounded like impossibly catchy diary entries. The script appeared to have been written: young D’Arcy was primed to step into the footprints of John O’Neill, Tom Wheeler & Co. and join the ranks of the great Northern laureates of youth.
That, however, proved to be a miscasting on our part.
In the years since – years that have seen him complete his degree and move onto a PhD – John has expanded his repertoire into areas that are a long way from teenage hi-jinks.
If the temptation to follow his peers onto the hamster wheel of EP/gig/EP/gig was a live one, his subsequent actions showed him resisting it with ease.
Yes, the pop songs kept coming – but they were appearing in strange forms. Take A Walk Around Lisburn – a collaboration with the choir from a local primary school – glance behind the choruses and hooks and you’ll find an affectionate yet slyly subversive depiction of his hometown. More strikingly, however, was a lurch into the world of interactive sound installations: voice-based electro-acoustic music, poetry apps and tricksy soundscapes.
D’Arcy’s early material was straightforward, lyrical, power-pop that seemed to take its inspiration squarely from his own life. The work he’s involved with now is much more experimental and theoretically playful. The question, it seems, needs to be asked: is it the same John D’Arcy?
“It does seem like there’s a huge gap between the types of work I’m making,” laughs John. “I haven’t really done much to integrate them as of yet. I haven’t found the right project to bring everything together. But even though the styles may seem miles apart, the main themes are the same – characters, storytelling and autobiography. The sound collages I compose all follow a narrative, whether it’s about energy consumption in the home (Energy Efficient) or the dystopia of online social networks (News Feed). Though I suppose you could say it’s still a lot more abstract than my songwriting.”
University appears to have had a profound effect on D’Arcy’s creative mojo. And he’s only too happy to talk about the manifold ways academia has opened up his imagination.
“It’s been great,” he says.” I’ve got to know a lot of artists working with sound in areas outside popular music which has inspired me to get involved myself. I’ve also learned a lot of different ways to work with sound beyond your typical echo and modulation production effects. This, as well as learning a bit of computer programming has let me design my own interactive systems for generating music and sound installations.”
Marnabrae, the latest project he is involved with, is the most striking example yet of how D’Arcy has developed as an artist over the last five years. A collaboration with his partner, Clara Kane, the pair have transformed their home into an organic kind of instillation, which they hope will provide the invited audience with a full sense of the ‘sound of their relationship’.
“It’s the culmination of a 24/7 week-long recording project Clara and I undertook together,” he explains. “We compressed each of our 168 hours into one hour, where you hear our lives as shifting sonic textures that are blurry, noisy, and a lot of times quite musical. From this a lot of other works emerged, each focused on highlighting different elements of everyday sounds we heard during the week of recording. Clara’s background is in theatre, set design and public art, but she’s also really interested in recording technologies and avant-garde sound. There’s a nice crossover in our specialities which makes it easy to work together. “
It’s safe to say that few of John’s contemporaries will be copying this trick. Which is, of course, the very reason that John D’Arcy’s progress, whatever avenues it decides to wander down, promises to be one of the most interesting sonic journeys we’ll have the privilege of following round these parts.
And who knows, he may even knock out a tune or two along the way.
“I have a few songs right now that are crying out to be recorded, “ he smiles. “When I get a minute.”

See marnabrae.blogspot.ie for more