Laura LAIR / Gile Na Gile
October 19, 2021 § Leave a comment
You can hear my newest piece ‘Gile Na Gile’ in the Chill-out Room as part of ‘Utopia’ at the NCH on Saturday.
“On Saturday 23rd October Kate Butler, Don Rosco and No Place Like Drone present The Chill Out Room as a Radical Space (Loving You) from 10am-7.30pm. This free event features new sonic work by commissioned artists and provides a communal space to imagine another future. DJs and music manipulators, No Place Like Drone, Don Rosco and Kate Butler, invoke the chill-out room of the rave era, offering nothing less than blissed out psychedelia, kosmiche, transcendentalism and mysticism, with specially commissioned music by Laura LAIR, Jonathan Deasy and Bambi. At 8pm that night MCs convene on the NCH stage for Utopia: Cypher at 8pm when Rebel Phoenix, Strange Boy, DJ Replay, Dyramid and more guests to be announced will create a freestyle cyper. The unrehearsed, spontaneous show features beats from emerging producers across Ireland, and bars from extraordinary MCs cutting through the noise. “
24 Hours of Women’s Voices / Mixcloud
March 15, 2018 § Leave a comment
Mná na hÉireann 💚 24 Hours of Women’s Voices
You can now listen back to all the amazing shows from last week on the DDR mixcloud
Tá mo chlár ‘Visions’ anseo:
LAIR / Aisling
June 9, 2016 § Leave a comment
The tracks Ar Ais, Ais and Aisling are all variations on a theme. The titles are all Irish words (as in, in the Irish language).
I don’t tend to explain my music but as I am feeling drawn to use Irish a lot in titles and lyrics within tracks I am currently writing, I thought it might be of interest to non-Irish speakers to know how to pronounce and to have a definition of the titles.
‘Ar Ais’ is pronounced like you would say the words ‘air ash’ in English. ‘Ais’, again, sounds like ‘ash’. And ‘Aisling’ sounds like ‘ash-ling’.
I wrote these tracks as I was preparing to leave Ireland to come here to the US, saying goodbye in a more final way than I have previously done in all my years of travelling.
The Irish language often doesn’t directly translate- I think that is really reflected in how Irish people express themselves in what is the first language for most of us nowadays in Ireland, English. There can be layers of meanings, depending on context and intonation, within a word or sentence.
I feel these titles express the many layers in terms of what I am referencing and expressing through the music but you need to understand the ‘top layer’ to be able to get to another-
Ais means ‘return’
Ar Ais means ‘to return’ or to go back
Ar can also mean ‘on’, so the title is referencing that the track is based on the track Ais
Aisling means ‘dream’ or ‘vision’
Aisling is also the name of a very important style of poetry- in these poems, Ireland appears to the poet in a vision in the form of a woman
Perhaps understanding the words and then having some context of when I wrote the music will give you new insight into the tracks themselves. Either way, I hope you enjoy listening!
Laura LAIR
Laura Kilty 