Mayo native returns to home county for Linenhall gig

The Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, is hosting Mayo native Seamus Fogarty in concert in a week's time.

Raised on Irish folk music and experimental electronica, his songs are a strange and hearty stew, taking traditional structures and compositions and amping up, warping, distorting, and mis-shaping them with layers of electronic dissonance and interference, found-sound spoken-word samples and other assorted rogue audio curio.

“I began playing the tin whistle when I was four, took up the guitar when I was 10, learning all of the album Use Your Illusion 2 by Guns N’ Roses off by heart,” Seamus recalls. “From there I moved on to Smog, Palace Brothers and John Fahey before leaning back into the Irish folk music of my youth and devouring my parents' collection of early Autechre records.”

Seamus’s new album, Ships, begins with ‘Come Down To The Square’ – an urbanite distant cousin of his earliest pastoral songs, rooted not in found sounds from the Irish countryside but the babble and buzz of central Walthamstow, complete with God-fearing street preachers and impassioned stall holders, all set to a backdrop of droning synth and chiming banjo.

Motorik-folk fusion ‘Fire’ revisits a clutch of old verses found buried in a phone and dismissed in the moment for being 'too simple and honest' before being reignited by an unlikely combination of instruments from Moog synthesiser to tin whistle, masterfully turning something that 'started out a bit introspective', says Seamus, 'into something quietly inspirational'.

The album’s title track and emotional centrepiece, ‘Ships’, takes its unabashedly romantic chorus from a Tracy Emin neon artwork on Margate harbour and sails on a breeze of sweeping, delicately detailed progressive pop worthy of prime Brian Wilson.

See how Seamus fuses the sounds together on stage at the Linenhall, Castlebar, on Thursday, November 12. Tickets are on sale now via the Linenhall Arts Centre’s website.