Dordán and An Gléacht - double film release on Diatribe Records
Quiet Music Ensemble is delighted to announce the release of Dordán and An Gléacht, two groundbreaking works by Caoimhín Breathnach/Jennifer Walshe on Diatribe Records.
Outsider artist Breathnach spent the last years of his life planning a work called An Gléacht. The work was to combine subliminal tapes and films with filmed footage showing a sequence of occult rituals. Breathnach’s great-niece, the composer and artist Jennifer Walshe, completed An Gléacht for the Cork Film Festival in 2015, where it was first screened with live musical accompaniment.
Dordán tells the stories of Pádraig MacGiolla Mhuire (1924–1992) and Caoimhín Breathnach (1934–2009) through the eyes of Breathnach’s great-niece, composer Jennifer Walshe. The two men are pioneers in the development of the Irish avant-garde.
Originally composed as an audiovisual work for Quiet Music Ensemble, the film of Dordán presented here encapsulates the piece in an independent work created by Maximilian Le Cain. It is intended to be both an artwork in itself and a way of presenting Walshe’s original composition
Dordán’s complex mesh of sounds, images, texts and choreographies coalesce to create a compelling story of two (fictional) Irish artists — Caoimhín Breachnach and Pádraig Mac Giolla Mhuire — and their discoveries with sound. It is a piece about the astonishing ways in which sound alters us; about how sound permeates our world, shapes it, deepens it. Sound is a meaningful presence, not a thing to be used as a building block to make something else, an idea that lies at the heart of QME’s philosophy. This music is beautifully crafted for QME, but somehow is also an observation about QME and its aesthetic.
In 2022 and 2023, we made a studio recording of the audio and commissioned the amazing experimental film maker Maximilian Le Cain to create a film of the piece - not a documentation of a performance: rather, a reshaping of the piece into another medium. The result is an astonishing and utterly compelling experience, the precise meaning of which is always elusive yet profound.
An Gléacht is a film containing footage by Caoimhín Breathnach and completed by his niece Jennifer Walshe in 2015 that also acts as a kind of graphic score to shape the musicians’ improvisation. Our interpretation, recorded in 2022, combines new sounds and reinterpretations of sonic materials from Dordán to pull the two works into a close dyad.
- John Godfrey, Artistic Director, Quiet Music Ensemble