Irish composer and double bassist Caimin Gilmore is widely recognized for his work with ground breaking new music group Crash Ensemble and collaborations across a strikingly diverse musical landscape. An interdisciplinary and versatile modern musician, he has shared the stage with internationally renowned artists like Lisa Hannigan, Dermot Kennedy, Aaron Dessner, Jessy Buckley, Dirty Projectors, Sam Amidon, Greg Saunier, to name a few, and features on over 40 recordings, including releases from Damon Albarn, Boygenius, and on Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album ‘Thanks for the Dance’ with European ensemble s t a r g a z e, among many others. Gilmore is stepping forward with BlackGate, his highly anticipated debut album, arriving on August 1st through New Amsterdam Records in collaboration with Dublin’s Ten Spot Records.
“There has been a long lineage of non classical artists working primarily in ‘commercial’ music who dig from the contemporary classical music well & also write it,” Gilmore explains. He traces his own path to genre fluidity back to a 2019 panel at Cork’s Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival:
“The first time the idea that this cross pollination was rigorously happening was listening to NewAm Artistic Director William Brittelle at Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival… That interaction cemented, and made sense of, how ‘classical’ composers and musicians were also working in genre-fluid ways internationally and this gave assurance to the idea that my musical ideas, amassed performing across genres, had credibility as a notated work also.”
Commissioned by Galway’s BlackGate Cultural Centre with support from the Arts Council of Ireland, and developed during a year-long residency with Dublin City Council, BlackGate is a beautifully textured suite for harp, cello, double bass and Yamaha DX7, featuring Kate Ellis (cello) and Lavinia Meijer (harp). The music draws on minimalist structures and extended techniques to build what Gilmore calls a “spectral sound world”, shaped by his life as a performer across contemporary classical, indie, traditional and orchestral music. He comments:
”I was interested in writing a piece that lived somewhere—harmonically and structurally—between indie and minimalist music; using extended string techniques to create a spectral sound world. At the time I was playing and jumping across a broad range of styles—contemporary music, folk/Irish traditional music, playing in indie groups, and symphonic repertoire with orchestras. I felt that the playing techniques I was using across these genres were transferable, and the diffuse sonic worlds were conducive with each other–they could live together if it was a reflection of how I approached them, or maybe how I understood them. It felt most natural to me to write something with this cross pollination of genres in mind. BlackGate as such became a natural reflection of the different types of music and people I was performing and collaborating with at the time of writing it.”
Following on from ‘MVE III’, Gilmore has shared a second track from the album, the gorgeous and heavenly ‘MVE I’. The single arrives with a visual accompaniment by Steve O’Connor. Watch it below and listen to ‘MVE III’ straight after.