Belfast’s Phil Kieran and his debut LP ‘Shh’

Belfast’s Phil Kieran and his debut LP ‘Shh’

9 November, 2009 | 8.53AM

• Written by: pollylavine
• Filed under: Music News: cocoon recordings, phil kieran

Perhaps as I enter the orbital route to central Belfast’s inner folds it’s the impression created by an industrious skyline, solidly imprinted with mustard colour Harland And Wolff cranes that hover over the port acting as a reminder to industrial activities that bubble away in the city.

Perhaps, after experiencing nearly 30 years of the ‘troubles’, the city’s inhabitants lived through darker times and the remains indelibly left a harder edge on its nightlife’s undercurrents. Perhaps, simply, Belfast is future forward in musical taste.

Whatever the reasoning, whatever the condition, Belfast has always been a town that has loved its tougher electronic music, and techno has always been a staple within that diet.

It might be more commonly known as the town that made the unsinkable ship ‘The Titanic’, but it’s also the town that made Phil Kieran, producer, DJ and creative artist, who much like another contemporary of his generation, David Holmes, helped define the city’s electronic music scene over the last 15 years.

He has released over a hundred 12-inches since 2000, on labels like Skint, Novamute and Soma. Kieran’s image is synonymous with Belfast’s main club nights ‘Stiff Kitten’ and ‘Shine’, which have helped bolster the city’s reputation for being a ‘Techno Town’.

Having begun producing at 16 years of age Kieran has finally reached a climax point, the debut album.

‘Shh’ is filled with elements that exude influence from Kraftwerk, Orbital, and Warp Records, and it contains samples, live instrumentation, and experimental electronic recordings from the 1950s. It’s a tougher electronic statement.

Grit filled dub inspired tracks such as ‘R.E.S.P.’ clash against melodic tracks like ‘Don’t Look Far Away’ and ‘Never-Ending Mountain’.

The live performance I catch later that night is back-dropped by a specially commissioned visual show of ‘descriptive shapes’ that synch and loop in time to the album tracks, whilst Kieran wears a pair of specially made LED glasses that accompany the images in time.

Kieran has always been an elusive figure in the electronic community in Ireland, and he himself admits to putting up ‘smokescreens’ so that people couldn’t figure him out. I decided to try.

You started producing at 16. What were you using back then to make music?

An Atari ST and a Korg M1. I mean it was shit but I started as a DJ and producer, and swung between the two. I didn’t have much money so I was doing jobs like McDonalds and collecting glasses in pubs for £2 an hour!

I know a guy that’s doing stuff now who gets stuff bought for him. I remember in my early twenties sitting in my flat and having a shitty mattress on the floor and all this nice shiny equipment: a mixing desk that was £3000, and a sampler that cost me £2000 that I would have to pay off, bit by bit, every two weeks.

Another 50 quid another 100 quid - it’s depressing thinking about it! But I still have most of that equipment.

It’s kind of sentimental because I made most of my tracks on that Akai S3000 sampler. I couldn’t afford records so I would go through a stage of buying equipment and my friends would buy records. I would still be listening to stuff and finding out what was going on and could make music at the same time.

Were you putting all of your money into equipment rather then towards a bed?

Yeah but I didn’t even question that - it didn’t seem bizarre to me. Some of my friends would come and laugh and I would be like ‘what’s wrong with that?’.

There was no question in my mind about spending my money on equipment. That was all that mattered to me.

What do you think about production being ‘virtual’ now?

Well whatever, it’s more sensible. Some kid can take their parent’s laptop, stick a few plug-ins on it and get started.

I wish I could have done that back then, to even get started you needed a few thousand pounds, but you know people will sneer and say that it’s just loads of people making shit music. But you know, only the good stuff surfaces above it all and I firmly believe that.

The other thing is if you don’t know how to really use the software or equipment it’s going to sound shit and it will have a really bad sound to it. Then if you have money you can buy outboard stuff and get this nice warm analogue sound to it, whatever.

It’s not like it is an elitist thing which there was before with music- DJs with their vinyl and only 50 people had this record for six months, and only ‘I can make this music because I’m privileged enough to own this equipment and you lot can all fuck off’.

Everybody should be able to have a go, now at least someone who is talented and who doesn’t have money can get into some cracked program and make music and get it out of their system.

Even someone in a third world country can do it now. Previously the industry controlled the media with PRs and all that, but it seems to be in the hands of the artists now with direct marketing over the internet.

Have you applied this to your album?

It’s something I’ve had to make myself a little more aware of. When you do an album you’ve got to be aware of how your album is going to get out there and how people are going to hear your music.

Where as up to this point, I’ve always had the attitude of ‘I’ll just put a record out and I don’t give a shit whatever’.

Now, I’ve just realised you’ve got to put a bit of thought to it and give yourself your own little bit of individuality. When you think about me or anyone else who does music you think about an image or what it is and what it sounds like straight away and I think that’s what I always lacked before - some kind of sense of what it looked like or sounded like.

I was attracted to that, and I deliberately put all these smokescreens up because I didn’t want anyone to figure me out.

You were happy with anonymity, but with the album you’re trying to create a little bit of image? Why the change?

Well I think the thing that flipped for me was everything I do has to have a creative slant on it or a reason why I do it.

Before I felt like you’re whoring yourself by putting packaging on it. I suddenly had, well, not an epiphany but I realised getting design done and all these nice things, you actually get into it.

I used to go to art college and if you actually start applying it to your music in a creative way it’s exciting and interesting if you try to make it work together.

If you make it a creative thing then it becomes interesting as opposed to a branding/marketing thing. It sort of becomes fun.

So how many elements did you add to this album?

I made the music first of all and it came from a gut feeling. Up to a point the tracks were just numbered, you can’t describe the way sound is, you can’t word it, or put pictures to it to a point. Making music is just a feeling that is coming out of you but once it’s done, when you listen back to it, you think ‘oh that’s like pink isn’t it, that’s like red’.

Do you identify colour with sound then?

You can do yeah. You’ll see in my visuals that there are obvious things, things go white and things go red. I mean the mood affects it also, or if things go frantic the visuals move more intensely, or if it’s more rhythmical, things move more.

The album cover came from a painting called ‘OOF’ I saw in New York in the Museum of Modern Art, by Edward Ruscha.

I was walking around the gallery and this thing just kind of booted me in the face. It’s around that time of pop art and modernism. I was trying to think of what art describes my music, I seen this and I thought ‘I think that’s it’, but then I didn’t like the letters cos I thought ‘OOF’ was a bit flat. 

I saw a girl with a t-shirt which had ‘SSH’ on it and I thought it was just more appropriate. I’ve always been into that era of 20th Century art between Bauhaus and modernism, even the minimal stuff around that.

The cover is sort of a Bauhaus thing, it’s quite plain and stark, with rigid lines and colour.

I want to talk to you about Belfast and techno. In some ways you epitomise what the techno image of Belfast is. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, I’ve always been into something a bit more leftfield anyway. Some of the records I did a few years ago, some of the club things, had more of a party/fun feel to them, but I grew up listening to Warp, Skam, Autechre and Basic Channel in the 90s, then things moved on and you take a different direction. Though I think a lot of that is coming back to me lately.

There was a time when clubbing in Belfast and Northern Ireland at clubs like Space, The Point Inn etc. were associated with UVF or the IRA. How do you think the peace process has impacted clubbing in Northern Ireland?

I remember going out to things in the art college and there was always an underbelly of gangsters and things going on. The guys that you knew were guys that had guns on them or were drug dealers.

Dance music was a dirty word back then. Acid house was really a wrong thing. We used to go out and just be waiting for the cops to walk in and shut it down, when the doors were closed and the music was just going nuts it felt edgy.

They were linked to paramilitaries weren’t they?

Yeah of course and over the years, lots of people were shot here, and stuff, and it all just disappeared. Guys who were selling drugs were all shot, I know it’s nasty but when you’re young it feels a bit edgy, but you know at the same time I wouldn’t want my daughter going out in something like that.

The ironic thing was in ’92 and ‘93, I remember the police coming in and shutting it down they thought dance music was this terrible thing, and 10 years later on New Year’s Eve I was standing playing live on BBC Radio 1 at City Hall banging out techno to the public, and the was mayor there and everything, and I was looking down Royal Avenue at the art college, thinking ‘what just happened here?’

10 years ago you could be arrested for playing dance music due to the Criminal Justice Bill, which banned repetitive beats and stuff, and the next thing there is a government sponsored rave a few years down the line.

It’s just bizarre. You only ever realise what’s right and what’s exciting after you’re in it. You don’t realise it when you’re actually in it.

How do you think Ireland as a country is punching its weight internationally?

I like that guy Donnacha Costello is interesting - I’d probably collaborate with him if the opportunity came up. And Matador has done some interesting stuff, but you know I’m not that romantic about it.

I just like getting on with it and doing music. There has definitely always been a divide between how north and south do their music. It’s a psychological divide, the money is different, the politics are different, the border is there.

It’s a subconscious divide. Space Dimension Controller, Jack Hamill, and Miniminds are who I’m watching locally.

Berlin is really a hub. Do you ever see yourself considering a move to Berlin?

If I was single and just milling around I might think about going somewhere like that but I’m not so sure if it benefits me. Sometimes you can live in a city like Berlin and you can get too swayed by the current trends, and it’s very fashionable and it’s what is in, and then suddenly you want to go back and play it.

I kind of think some of the best music is made when there is a certain amount of naivety too it, when you’re not completely aware of what’s going on. It just comes out of you, it’s something different.

If I’m living in Berlin, I’m going to be making the same stuff as everyone else because you become so overwhelmed with going to these clubs and everyone talking about the same thing and doing the same thing.

I know it all develops and goes in trends, but I kind of have this opinion that if you soak up something completely different that people don’t experience or aren’t used to, possibly your music will sound completely different.

So maybe being here and just having good friends and the internet and trying to stay in touch with music, travelling around, and playing music, it’s not like I’m going to lose touch with what’s going on.

Artists can be based anywhere, but if I could live anywhere, it would be Melbourne, Australia. I love it.

Where have you been soundwise over the last couple years? Is minimal where you have been?

Well yeah but you know I had a really ‘fruitful’ (if you want to call it that) period. I was getting asked to do loads of remixes and was kind of, you know, the man of the moment around 2003. And then I just took this head thing and I wanted it to stop.

I just felt like I had done everything I could do with everything I was doing. That’s why I started Alloy Mental and I did that for three years.

So are you drifting back towards techno?

Well it’s not really that, it’s more electronica now. I mean growing up, the guy who inspired me first was David Holmes. It was going to his nights that got me into all of that Andrew Weatherall stuff.

It’s bizarre though. He stopped playing dance music in the mid 90s, and people still think he’s going to play a techno set. They’re both a really big influence on me.

I hated dance music or at least I thought I did. When I was 15 or 16 I was into The Smiths and Pixies and I turned my nose up at dance music thinking ‘that’s for spides or whatever with a wee quiff’, then the penny drops that you fucking love it and there’s a layer to it that you didn’t know about.

There’s something really interesting in it. It was overnight almost, then all of sudden I hated guitars. But then you’re like that when you’re younger. You hate that and you just like this and you just like that and then you get a bit older and you like it all, your mind is more open.

What exactly does your album say?

Well it says to me it lacks bullshit, and to me it’s just honest and describes exactly how I feel about the music I am into and I’ve just tried to be as honest as I possibly can and just do what I feel good about, and not be fashionable.

Making something that comes from my testicles and my stomach and everything inside, and just try to get it out in some form. It has always been about trying to make something that I wanted to hear.

Is that what you think an artist album is about then? Does an album epitomise what the artist wants?

Well yeah, there is continuity to it and there is feeling to it. I seen Kraftwerk last September and that was a big kind of launching pad to something that was so honest. I was going to go to Berlin and Berghain and listen to loads of DJs and I’m glad I didn’t now.

I’m glad I listened to Kraftwerk and stuff like that, as well as listen to older stuff from 50 years ago. There’s stuff I’ve taken from old workshops from 1957 to 1963 that Philips commissioned.

I had this box set amongst other stuff that I collect. Basically they were no one doing stuff with weird noises other then the BBC.

That’s the first kind of electronic music there was with synthesisers and stuff. The BBC were doing it cos they had the money to do it but these workshops in Holland were going on and these guys were making the stuff, and then it all just dried up cos everyone thought it was just bullshit, just noise and twiddles and that it was just a waste of time and it wasn’t music. A lot of them stopped.

The electronic stuff goes back to the mid 50s and then a bit of the 60s, and then the 70s with Tangerine Dream, then the 80s with New Order, putting drum machines into their music, and of course Kraftwerk - you know they invented it all. It annoys me when people from Detroit start rabbiting on that they invented techno. It was Kraftwerk, full stop.

What hardware/software did you use to make this album?

Mostly Cubase and various lists of plug ins. Out board, I have an old 70’s soundcraft desk, valve compressor, and a few other bits and bobs.

What’s currently in your studio?

All above plus outboard, two Nords, three compressors, and some effects.

Any tips for young bedroom producers?

Work, work, work.

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