Getting the lead out

We're here again with Joel Cathcart, one-third of acoustic folk provocateurs, Albrecht's Pencil, and, just like when we met last year, the classically-trained multi-instrumentalist has plenty to say.

"I loathe the internet, I really do," he sighs. "Would BB King be blogging? I doubt it. It devalues genuine praise and feedback because everyone is brilliant. I've never felt the need for that kind of exposure. My approach to things is much more hermit in a cave, I'm afraid."
Thankfully, for someone who proves such enlightening company, Joel, at the moment, is happy to come blinking into the sunlight for a chat. And while he eagerly roams across a winningly expansive conversational terrain ("I'd move away from electricity entirely if I could"), he's primarily here to talk about his band's debut album: the handily-titled Self-titled Debut Album.
Recorded last summer in various locations in and around Queen's University in Belfast, it's a record that wears its erudition lightly: smart, literate and sophisticated, it never once loses its sense of intimacy and immediacy.
"Fionbarr (Byrne, co-founder, and along with Laura McGrogan fellow, um, Pencil) stops me from becoming too obscure," reveals Joel. "I suppose I stop him from being too accessible. I think that results in a good healthy tension. At the same time, I don't think it's the case that because you think about music a lot, and have a broad range of listening, what you end up composing will inevitably be obscure. The songs are very personal to me, and I think what inspires all of our music is a desire to communicate. Really, what we're interested in is allowing the sound to get across to the listener as directly as possible. I think our mentality for this record, for the group in general, is to be as direct as possible in the relationship between the sound and the listener. Even if you're subverting expectations, even if there are tensions and dissonance, there's a desire for closeness, for as pure a connection as possible."
The many nuances (most deliberate; some the result of ‘happy accidents') and shades running throughout Debut Album mean it's probably best experienced in a dark room with a set of submersion head-phones. These are songs that demand your full attention, whose contours are paper thin and liable to be ignored unless the circumstances are just right. Which, being the case, has left Joel with an ambivalent attitude to playing them live.
"We're an acoustic band who make acoustic music," he says. "And I think it's simply the case that music like ours gets distorted when put through amplification equipment. We're always looking for ways to cut through the clutter that exists between a song and a listener. Our focus has always been on acoustically produced timbres, and I'd never use amplification again if I could get away with it. Amplification is a means of allowing your songs to reach more people. But once it actually starts to colour and change those songs – what's the point?"
To counter this, over the last year and a half Albrecht's Pencil have deliberately sought out environments in which they feel their music will best prosper – subsequently finding themselves playing in the Palm House in Belfast's Botanic Gardens, in the middle of the audience at the Black Box, "in a field" at the Willowstone Festival, and even in the living rooms of a handful of fans.
"We've been getting closer to a kind of contentment," smiles Joel. "We've been trying to create a bit of space for ourselves. Somewhere that a band that's slightly left of the traffic lights can flourish."
With Fionbarr recently decamped permanently to London, this space could prove even more difficult to find.
However, while Joel claims to be pondering a move involving "a collaborator in a post-hardcore, electronic brutality thing" and/or "a nomadic jazz ensemble that will play in multi-storey car parks" (and he could well be the only local musician with a chance of pulling either enterprise off), it shouldn't be assumed that Albrecht's Pencil have been put finally in their box.
"It's another challenge," he says. "It'll demand a new approach from all of us. But I'm confident some interesting music will develop out of the new arrangements."
If they won't allow electricity to get between them, what hope has the Irish Sea?