'GAELIC HEART, Modern Mind' could - should - be the very definition of Daithí's approach to music, a deep respect and love for traditional music and culture, with a forward looking embrace of the modern.
Daithí's music has increasingly been preoccupied with how to present something unapologetically Irish within a form of music - dance, and electronica - that is resolutely internationalist, and yet still have appeal across cultural lines. Holiday Home, the new EP by the Clare-born, Galway based, musician, is a further endeavour in this regard, and a successful one at that.
Opening tracks, 'Fallling For You' and 'Aeroplane', both featuring vocalist Sinead White, are cool, measured, seductive pieces of electro-pop. However it is the title track and 'Coral' where we really hear the 'Gaelic mind, modern heart' ethos.
'Holiday Home' matches nineties style synth motifs with a vintage recording of an 11-year-old bodhrán player who won an All-Ireland fleadh in the 1990s - an odd pairing in theory, but in practice it works excellently. 'Coral' takes a wordless vocal, and through digital manipulation re-creates it as a piece of improvised sean nós scat singing. It could have sounded forced or twee, but in Daithí's hands, it sounds natural, and imaginative.
Daithí launches Holiday Home in the Róisín Dubh on Friday April 28 at 11.30. Tickets are €12.50/10. See www.roisindubh.net
