One-To-One With Dance Producer Daithi

Daithí is a man whose reputation precedes his name. He’s been solidifying his place on the dance music scene over the last few years, and it’s been a pleasure to witness. Mixing his perfected array of beats with a range of different influences which incorporate the sounds of his home in the Wild Atlantic Way.
In between his hectic gigging schedule, he kindly took the time to answer some of our questions and tell us about all of his different projects, his collaborative process and how he made his granny a superstar.
You’ve been a main stay on the scene for the past couple of years, but for anyone who might have somehow managed to avoid hearing you, your sound is probably easiest described as electro, house music, but you then bring in the traditional Irish influence, especially through your fiddle playing...
Yeah, definitely. The last 2 years have been very much focused on getting just Irish culture in general from around the country – word pieces and atmosphere in general – and try and mix it in to the actual tracks to try and get an Irish feel into the electronic music. One of the biggest problems with electronic music is that you’re using machines all the time so it can be very hard to get feeling out of it. But then, when you do get feeling out of it, it becomes this incredible, transcending moment where people are on a dance floor and it means so much to them because everybody’s together. That’s what you’re looking for all the time – to try and get this feeling out of people on a dance floor.
Talking about ‘feeling’ there, it instantly brings ‘Mary Keane’s Introduction’ to mind. It’s obviously a song that’s really personal to you....
For sure, yeah. It was like a testing ground for me because before that I was writing a lot of tracks and getting very sick of the idea of releasing this stuff that didn’t really have a lot of myself in it. So in a protest to that I said to myself ‘f**k it, I’ll put my granny on something, that’ll be a good one’. Then it just blew up and it was way, way bigger than I would have expected and it was just a real proof of concept because everyone was like ‘this is incredible’ and I was like ‘yeah, I agree’ and that’s what set off the rest of my career.
You heard a recording of your grandmother being interview. Was it a case of you composing the music around that, or did you have a track that you thought would really fit in with it?
I had a set of chords that I didn’t know what to do with, because they were these really hopeful, happy chords but I had no idea what to put them with, so they were sitting on my computer for ages. Then, when I came across the interview I really distinctly remember being in my apartment at like 3 o’clock in the morning getting this interview and putting it into my laptop – and like, the interview is like 2 hours long! It’s so long and there’s loads of rubbish in it! So I had to just cut out the pieces that I really liked. It took me ages to determine the little pieces I wanted. I was cutting it down and cutting it down and at one point I just threw in the chords and it worked really, really well.
From there – just with the chords and the way she was saying the stuff – I knew it was gonna be a proper track. I really distinctly remember all of that – and then the next day I mixed it into a full track. The process is always so strange now because I spend a lot of time almost being a historian – just finding stuff, different stories or the background of where I’m from. Then, at some point, I’ll bring music into it. But it takes a while. Then when it does happen, everything comes really, really quickly. It’s quite strange in a way –you could have nothing for like, 3 weeks , and then all of a sudden you could have 4 things in a row. It’s fun!

It’s really nice that you can make it so personal, and incorporate some of your heritage into it. The video for your single ‘Aeroplane’ does a similar thing.
Yeah, it’s definitely in the same vein. The video is from a short film that was made where I’m from. It’s so strange – I had completely forgotten that it was even a thing. My mother brought it up one time when I was talking to her and it just hit me like a flash. I remember really, really clearly being with my brother watching this thing over and over again because it was like a movie, but local people from the town were featuring in it – it was just the weirdest thing in the world. I managed to track it down then and it was really great. It was a similar reaction as well – it’s this idea of the beauty in the mundane of Irish culture that I really love – the weird turn of phrases that we have and the way people are where I’m from in the west. It’s just fascinating and really beautiful at the same time, so if you can get that out into a track it’s really special.

On ‘Aeroplane’, you collaborated with Sinead White, who you do quite a few collaborations with. You also worked with people like Elaine Mai and Danny from The Coronas. How does that then translate into your live show?
At the moment, Sinead comes with me on a lot of gigs. Myself and Sinead now have about 5 songs so we have almost 30 minutes of a set that she can do. So at a lot of the bigger shows we’ve had her come out, and she’s just incredible – pitch perfect every time and she’s just a really, really good performer. I’ll usually do like an hour before or something and then she’ll come out – sometimes we won’t even announce it or anything, she’ll just appear and people really love it. They love the songs – she did a lot of the writing on those lyrics and stuff, especially with one of my earlier tracks, ‘Love on Top’. That was the first track that we ever worked on together and I sent her just the instrumental and she came back with the entire fully formed idea completely done, which is really, really rare. People really love that song and know every word and sing it back. I also do a lot of improvised versions of my own tracks and cut them up to make them different every time
You work on a lot of remixes too – one that was just released is your remix of Bantum’s ‘Feel Your Rhythm’ featuring Rusanango Family and Senita. You add a load of energy to that track with your beats. When you’re approaching doing a remix for someone, how does that differ from creating your own music?
Remixes are really fun to do, because you’re basically being handed a load of samples ready to go that you just have to use. It sets a cap on how much stuff you have, and you’ve got this challenge to use what you’re given to make something new. That’s what makes it really fun cos you then get to explore new production stuff so I really love doing it. I used to do loads and loads and loads of remixes and now I’ve kinda set it up differently where I’ll get people to send me the stems of each track that they want me to remix and I’ll mess around with it and decide then whether I want to continue or not . I don’t really commit to remixes anymore now – I just go ‘send me it and I’ll see what happens’. Some of them will work really well and I’ll think it’s a goer and THEN I’ll do some talking.
That remix was actually a real honour – I’m a hug fan of Bantum and Rusnanago Family and Senita – I’ve worked with Senita before but it’s so long since I got to work with her so it was great. For me Rusangano are one of, if not THE most important artists in the country right now. They’re really incredible and we’ve been talking about doing stuff for a really long time so it was great to get in and try and mess around with their vocals before getting something going. They’re just blatantly honest and incredible people who actually have something to say, which a lot of us don’t! It’s hard to find something worth saying, where they have so much they want to get off their chest and it’s so much more valuable and super, super important. So it’s an honour to work with their vocals.
You’ve also contributed some music to a short film that just premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh, For You. How did you get involved in that? Is it something you’d be interested in doing more of that kind of thing?
When Im not doing my own music, I work with a record label called Feel Good Lost who look after Talos and Joni and some other people coming up the line. I help them release music, basically do the job that I do for myself but with other acts and kind of steer them in the right direction and be like ‘I made all these mistakes, so don’t make these mistakes!’
Brendan Canty is the head of that label and he’s my best friend. His main thing is music videos – he did the ‘Take Me to Church’ video for Hozier. So he was making this short film and I’m basically like a bouncing pad for him! When he writes stuff or comes up with ideas for stuff he has about 6 or 7 mates who he gets to look at it. So from the very start of him doing it I was always randomly involved talking it out with him and everything and when he had it at a certain point it just made a load of sense, he needed a certain type of music. There was a couple of points where they needed intense drunken dance music for a debs party in a limo so I got to make this crazy cheesy dance music. It was really good fun to do.
It’s a really good example of what the creative scene is like in Ireland at the moment – he did a favour for me doing music videos for me just because he’s passionate about what I do and I’m super passionate about what he does as well , so you just help each other out. You get really magic results then because you take the rubbish planning out and debate stuff and have two people getting excited about making stuff, and it’s just the most magic thing in the world. I would love to do more of it as well – I did another film - Eadrainn Fein - which was actually on in the Lighthouse Cinema on Monday. I did the music for that as well; it’s an all Irish short film that came out last year. I really enjoy doing that, it’s definitely something I’d love to get into doing more – it’s interesting.
You’ve been gigging all over the place lately as well –you were playing all weekend, and you’re at Castlepalooza this weekend, you’ve dates all through August and you’re going to be on the No Encore Live podcast in September. How has the reaction been?
It’s been great, I’m really, really lucky that I’m getting a really regular gang of lads, I wouldn’t even call them fans! Just a gang of lads who are going to all these shows because they know what to expect and they know it’s gonna be a proper party. I do music full time and the only way I can make money from music is playing live, it’s where my main income comes from so I need to play as much as I possibly can all the time, so it’s sort of defined what I do, I just play live constantly – I think I did like 150 shows last year. It’s really intense.
When I first started out, if you did an Irish tour you might be able to do, say 4 dates and stuff where you do all the cities and stuff. Now, because of the way small town Ireland is building up there’s young people coming back into the actual towns – my whole generation is gone, they’re all gone to Australia, gone to Canada so there was a gap there..... But now there’s younger dudes than me who are really, really into dance music and get so excited when you get a live dance act going to their town. So now I can do like a 15 date tour back to back and go to all these towns everywhere. I get all these incredible stories of young lads who are running nightclubs in Navan and stuff, and they’re really passionate about it and they totally believe in it. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen come out of Ireland, is this excitement about live music. So yeah – playing live is pretty much all I do!

Apart from playing live, will you be doing any recording – any plans for a new album or anything?
I’m at the early stages now, as I said I’m being a historian at the moment so I’m constantly trawling through the internet finding stories and stuff. I’ve written a whole pile of stuff, so in October I’m going to go to France to a house over there and gonna just start recording an EP. Not doing any albums anymore – it’s all EP’s now. I’m trying to put out an EP a year so I can continuously put it out. You get loads of little bite sized projects and stuff.
So, to keep up to date with what you’re up to where’s the best place to look?
There’s Facebook, Twitter and Instragram – the trifecta. You can check me out on Spotify as well if you just Search Daithi as well.