The man from Atlantean

Fed up with remedial two-guitar-bass-and-drums combos bent on recreating some jangly Californian idyll-that-never-was? Looking for an alternative to confessional bore-in-a-pub songwriters labouring under the misconception that we care about their feelings?

Look no further. Paris resident Gareth Murphy’s Atlantean project is a double EP that explores a strain of lost world music located somewhere between prime Eno and Jah Wobble’s much overlooked post-Invaders albums, featuring the vocal talents of Lisa Hannigan and Natacha Atlas among others.
And if the twin-set often suggests ambient pop soundtracks for hypothetical films, in many ways that’s what it is. Bored of consumer Celtic modernism and intrigued by the work of rogue Irish filmmaker Bob Quinn, Murphy set about conceiving sounds drenched in oceanic dynamics, blue note throat music, Iberian duende and Irish arcana.
“I’d been writing songs about the sea for quite a while, playing with drones a lot,” Murphy explains. “All this stuff was brewing in my head, what it’d be like to mix Irish, Indian and Arabic music. And eventually someone said, ‘You should really check out Bob Quinn.’ So the next time I was in Dublin I went to the IFI and got the old films out. In fairness they were very dated, it was 1983 low-budget Irish TV, so audio-visually it was a bit dodgy at times, but his ideas were fucking amazing.”
Murphy was well aware of Quinn’s reputation as an outspoken maverick, but if anything that only made him more intrigued.
“Everyone in Dublin said, ‘Oh, he’s a difficult man, you don’t want to get him involved, just go and do your project,’” he says. “He’s probably made so many enemies because he says what he thinks. But I was curious, so I went out pretty much as a journalist to meet him. I think retrospectively I was asking his permission to do the project – without really asking.
“So I arrived in Connemara, and we went into the shed he uses as a working room and it was a really mad night, beers were pulled out, the room was one huge cloud of smoke, and he was talking away about his ideas. I realised this was a very clever man, not a bullshitter.
“What made it go from admiration to some sort of collaboration was I’d read a book by some genetic scientist who had developed this new way of mapping the movements of mankind around the world, a huge revolution in science. This guy pulls out a hair from your head and says, ‘Your ancestors are from…here.’ And sure enough, his theories seemed to concur with Bob Quinn’s, that the Irish weren’t Celts at all, they were from Spain, and the whole sea connection, all the coasts down as far as the Mediterranean and North Africa. So subsequently I put them in touch, and for Bob this was a huge moment, because his theory had been scientifically proven.”
Murphy has no illusions about Atlantean’s commercial prospects, but takes some solace in history’s revisionist veneration of cranks and visionaries.
“I think you have to really do it the hard way,” he says, “and possibly take three years and go mad making no-bullshit albums. Atlantean took so long to make: there were 25 tracks but only 15 were used. This wasn’t simple. It was like preparing myself for some kind of series of records and it would need to be patient. Like the notion of seeds, when things come out, you don’t have to expect fireworks to go off. Only a few people have to get it, but it takes time. I might well be deluding myself, but that’s certainly my conviction.”