PHANTOM DOG Beneath The Moon, the avant garde folk rock/shoegaze band centred around Galway born singer-songwriter Aaron Hurley, will feature in two different shows during the TULCA festival.
Phantom Dog’s music will be featured in Aughty, a new, feature length, experimental documentary by the artists Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan. The film explores the Aughty Mountain area in south Galway and the people who live there.
Aughty will be screened in the Nuns Island Theatre on Tuesday at 7pm. This will be followed by a question and answer session with the artists, as well as TULCA curator Gregory McCartney and festival chair Maeve Mulrennan.
Afterwards Aaron will play a gig upstairs in the Róisín Dubh at 9.30pm. Phantom Dog is a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Scott McLaughlin, but for this show Aaron will be solo.
So how did Aaron come to be involved in the Aughty film?
“I’ve known Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley since they were involved with Enso, the artist led initiative,” Aaron tells me. “They told me about the film and they asked if I’d have any music that could work. The tracks they used are from an album The Trees, The Sea In A Lunar Stream and an EP called Through A Forest Only, which were both recorded and written with Scott McLaughlin.
“The documentary is set around the Galway-Clare border, and me being from Galway and Scott from Clare is a funny coincidence. The soundtrack also features local traditional musicians and original piano music by Caoimhe Morley. The film is fantastic, a brilliantly atmospheric ode to the people and the landscape of the Aughty region. Their ideas about a fragmented narrative marries well with our ideas in music.”
For his Róisín Dubh gig, Aaron will be playing “avant folk music with shoegaze elements” and he plans to “veer into instrumental ambient guitar music to capture a film soundtrack feel”.
He will be accompanied for part of the set by members of the band Cubs, of which he is also a member, to play some Cubs tunes. Cubs recently released the EP on the independent Galway label Rusted Rail.
Aaron and Scott are also at work on a Phantom Dog Beneath the Moon record.
“It is a bit louder than previous releases, and will be out next year, also on Rusted Rail,” he says. “I’m also working on solo recordings but not sure when they are ready for the world, they’re a bit scared. Cubs will also continue to record our way about improvised outsider folk.”
For more information see www.tulca.ie and Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon’s Facebook page.
