For fans of Poor Creature, ØXN, Swans, contemporary dark-ish ambient music, and the preservation of linguistic diversity, Cloch ’s Claí by Trá Pháidin follows the survival of the Irish language in a new age of English dominance, using an ambient avant-folk style to reveal emotional commonalities between traditional storytelling and postmodern alienation. A natural, organic pulse anchors improvisation on Irish folk aesthetics, building into natural crescendos where the instruments form a danceable, rhythmic structure that subsides into moments of ambient liminality. Within these liminal moments, the band incorporates segments of spoken word delivered in Irish to bring us into the ground level of the present-day fight to keep this language alive, a conscious cultural effort which runs upstream of the neocolonialism of instant global communication. However, since our emotional responses to today’s challenges still follow the same human patterns as ever, traditional storytelling proves infinitely adaptable to the here and now, contributing to a living language with infinite utility to take on a changing world.
