Cork to get Flynn-trospective
One of the country’s most exciting, unique, and important songwriters is Leeside bound next month in support of his new album.
Award winning folk artist John Francis Flynn will play two shows on Leeside, starting with St Luke’s in Cork city on 9 December and De Barras, Clonakilty, on 10 December.
The show in De Barras will coincide with the release Flynn’s second album ‘Look Over The Wall, See The Sky’. It’s the highly anticipated follow up to 2021’s critically acclaimed ‘I Would Not Live Always’ which wowed critics across the board and was named MOJO magazine’s ‘Folk Album Of The Year’. It also led to Flynn being crowned Best Singer and Best Emerging Artist at the 2021 RTE Folk Awards.
In the lead up to December’s launch, Flynn has released his new single and accompanying video ‘Willy Crotty’. The eerie track was recorded in a bedroom in Leitrim using the unlikely combination of a clarinet, a handheld radio, a Casio SK1, a harmonica, and an effects pedal. Where the listener might hear horror or feel terror, John explains that these sonic provocations are his guttural language and are always aiding the emotional leverage of the song, in a way that traditional instruments can’t. As for the song’s protagonists, “these are the sounds of their lives being torn apart”.
Flynn’s music revolves around traditional and folk material from Ireland, but that is only the starting point. Often, to imagine Ireland is to fantasise about rolling hills, giants, saints, and snakes. As Flynn says, it involves “a fair bit of paddywhackery, and I hate paddywhackery”.
The psyche-Celtic album artwork for ‘Look Over The Wall, See The Sky’, hints at this: a crystal goblet of luminous green crème de menthe resting upon a mossy ledge, encapsulating this imagined idea of Ireland in a way that is both funny and poignant. But, if you have to imagine Ireland in the first place, then you’re probably not too familiar with its reality, says Flynn: the towering glass giants of Google and Facebook, the unaffordable luxury hotels lining the Liffey amidst a homelessness epidemic and the highest rents in Europe.
To listen to ‘Look Over The Wall, See The Sky’ is to enter a trance-like state. As expected, Flynn’s contemporary influences are sufficiently esoteric, from ‘The Heart Pumps Kool Aid’ by —__–___' to ‘The invention of the Human’ by Dylan Henner (a concept album about an AI learning to sing). However, he was also inspired by his contemporaries in the traditional music scene in Ireland, many of whom contributed to the album, as well as those outside of it, such as noise-rockers Gilla Band and Rising Damp.
On his last record, John was much more conscious of bringing acoustic instruments and weird synthesized sounds together as a concept. But now with his unique musical language fully formed, he says: “I feel freer within that language to experiment and take it further without it being too conscious or premeditated”.
The sonic landscape created through his unconventional use of instruments in jagged arrangements often teeters on the edge of disharmony, but it gives the work a magnetism by drawing the listener into its curious orbit of experimental folk. John masterfully unpicks traditional songs and rearranges them with an emotional force that sometimes leaves them unanchored and floating in a surreal space between the past and the present, the analogue and the digital, between love and tragedy.