Paddy Mulcahy: Letting the outside in

The process of collaboration in music has always interested me. I am a solo musician with a number of electronic instruments. I work alone in the studio and I mix all of my own music.

Whenever people ask me how many people are in my band, I tell them, “I just have a bunch of machines I tell what to do and when to do it.”

I do collaborate every day though. The instant I walk outside and pass a dog on the street, or have to dodge puddles in a rainy Limerick City, I’m immediately interacting with my surroundings. I take all of these happenings onboard and reflect on it when creating new music. As I type this, there is heavy snow falling on Thomas Street and I allow each snowflake to represent a different word I type.

When I started to work with videographers or directors for various advertisements or short film projects, I found myself quite adaptable in the area of collaboration, and creating a dialogue in a creative setting.

You must allow yourself to be open to suggestions and constructive criticism. All of this will inspire your next move, the next phrase of music you record.

In an audio-visual setting this can get very interesting, in that you are working with mixed media, and the idea of interpretation totally changes. Allowing this working relationship to flow will bring you to creative places that you couldn’t possibly visit if you were to shut yourself away from external sources of inspiration. Let a moment happen, let a conversation flow.

For example, one aspect of the phenomenon of synesthesia tells us that a person sees a certain colour when they hear a piece of music. What if a musician was to collaborate with a person with this condition, and a filmmaker?

Try something new based on an event that happened – can you reflect that through the music?

Try and capture your music through some sort of visual – expand your piece for further interpretation by the audience.
Sometimes it can be hard to break different habits we find ourselves in while writing music. The same chord progression, the same key, the same instrument.

Take something on board and use that as a guideline for doing something differently; and don’t forget that limitations can be very helpful here.

Personally, I find myself inspired by vintage machines, analogue signal paths & a hardware-based workflow. Here I can fully interact with my instruments and allow the process to inspire creativity.

A piece very worthy of a mention here is John Cage’s 4’33”, where the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece.

Depending on your surroundings, the environment becomes the orchestra. Birds act as a string section, passing cars can be looked at as brass and the ambient noise of street chatter can be the choir section.

The art of field recording capitalises on this when we see the field recordist compose a piece of music made up entirely of found sounds or environmental noises.

A maintenance person has just visited my apartment to fix a tap. The rhythm of him banging the tap and turning various tools has already got me humming little melodies in my head.
The next time you go to create anything, be it art, music, graphic design, working with textiles etc – try to let the outside in. You never know what might come of it.

• Paddy Mulcahy plays Dublin Unitarian Church on March 28.