Ian Nyquist
We need more percussive ambient music.
Irish producer and composer Ian Nyquist has embraced the bodhrán, a traditional Irish drum, on his newest album Gilded, to thrilling results. There’s a world where Gilded is remolded into a dancefloor classic, but in its natural shape, Nyquist’s ever fluctuating swirl of synths, samples and clanking percussion conjures images of a lost and forgotten forest, by equal turns beautiful and unnerving. We talked to him below.
What is the influence of the natural world on your music?
From a young age, being outside and spending time exploring has been important, and it feels like a big part of me. I also think that when you do anything creative for long enough, your identity and the things that matter to you just naturally become part of whatever you make. For me, this theme of being outside has appeared more so in recent years of making music, sometimes in very literal ways like field recording or site-specific projects. For example, Black Earth Cairn, a funded project recorded in response to the terrain of the Wicklow Mountains near where I live, and Thiar, a collage of sounds captured during a residency on the island of Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway.
Actually, the first instance of this theme appearing in my work that I can remember was an album I tried to make for the tundra as a setting sometime in my late teens or early twenties - I think it’s still floating somewhere in the online ether.
Gilded, for me, isn’t site-specific, but it definitely carries that same illustrative, soundtrack-like quality that reflects the places in nature where I’ve spent so many formative parts of my life.
Does your composition and production change when working with a vocalist as opposed to instrumental music?
I've also wondered this since finishing the record. Gilded is the first time I've worked with any vocalists other than myself, and I’ve come away from it feeling that it’s something I need to continue exploring. Initially, the idea of working with vocalists hadn’t even occurred to me, but as this body of work began taking shape, it started to make more sense to include voices from the trad and folk world, especially considering the fact I was using a traditional instrument.
The album became something inherently connected to that space, and I wanted to honour that through collaboration. I was lucky enough to find singers and songwriters whose work I deeply admire and whose voices felt like a good fit. The addition of others' voices still feels authentic to my own sense of sound and artistic standard. The people whose voices feature on this record had complete creative freedom, and my only suggestion was for them to contribute something personally meaningful to them. I think that starting point was incredibly helpful as a foundation for me to work from.
In comparison to many other “ambient” albums, this is a very rhythmic record. How do you approach making the rhythms more hypnotic?
This also happened naturally. The process of discovering this record came out of experimentation, and that sense of exploration carries through the tracks on this album, sometimes even just texturally. There’s a feeling of getting locked into a groove, almost like a mantra, with rhythms that feel like they could repeat indefinitely. There is a lot of rhythm throughout my discography, though it’s usually only ever just been implied rather than created with any kind of actual percussive instrumentation - that's definitely a first for me. Looking ahead, I think I’ll be refining this setup to focus more on rhythm, in a more minimalist way. Watch this space.
Are there images you want to conjure for a listener?
Nothing specifically, although going back to the influence of nature in my work, I live close to so much dramatic and expansive, cinematic scenery which definitely influenced the atmosphere I felt drawn to create for this record. I completely understand when people who actively listen to what I make compare it to a soundtrack in a very visual or "filmic" sense. I do make things that I think inherently accompany imagery whether real, or imaginary. A friend actually just shared with me that the music from Gilded is featuring in their dreams recently which I think is beautiful and also sounds like an apt pairing. On a more personal level, the production of this album took place alongside a period of letting things go, so the process became a kind of catharsis for me through that, especially in the escapism of the imagery it brought to my own mind. I hope that catharsis is felt on the record.
How did you come across the bodhran?
It’s an instrument that’s part of the music from a culture I’ve grown up adjacent to for much of my life so I think it just came through osmosis. It’s always looked like a satisfying instrument to play, and it’s one of those instruments that’s pretty easy to pick up and develop your own style on. I've been teaching myself how to use it for the past 2 years now.
What does handling the instrument feel like?
The conventional way of playing a bodhran is already pretty unique; It's played on its side in much the same way as many hand drums, although unlike a hand drum it's played with a stick or 'tipper' instead. The other hand is used to mute and bend the skin to produce different pitches and timbres with each strike. At some point through learning, you really do just become comfortable enough in finding different ways to get the drum to 'talk'. On top of that, I have modelling software mirroring these gestures which gives a whole other layer and feels like elevating the instrument's familiar sound. The first time I cracked that set-up around which this album is based, it felt like playing something totally new and honestly, at the risk of sounding overly full of myself, kind of like I was casting a spell or something. It was like a total breakthrough both for me and for the instrument’s potential. There is still so much creative possibility for making stuff through just rhythm and texture.
Were the different time signatures of “7/4” or “5/4” a challenge for yourself or something that happened naturally?
I love alternative time signatures. They just feel more organic in how asymmetrical they are. In the spirit of breaking convention on this record, it felt important to have some moments on this album where I could let the rhythm form in its own way, without forcing it into predictable structure - especially on tracks where there isn't even a discernable time signature (ouroboros, alchemy). This is balanced with more traditional rhythms that feature on Gilded such as 'jig' and reel'.
There’s something that sounds like a phone call or radio chatter on “7/4” what are those sounds?
Those are clips of dialogue from a man describing, in regional Irish, details of his home life while growing up in rural Ireland. I got those clips from a documentary about a Gaeltacht on the outskirts of Galway city.
“What else am I for” is beautiful and very catchy, how did Laucan’s work change your sound for that song?
Thank you! That track is for sure more pop-oriented than other tracks on the album. I think that comes from the fact that while Gilded was coming together, I was listening a fair bit to Samuel Organ, who produced Laucan’s electronic folk album LORCAN and who first introduced me to Laucan. As well as Samuel's production on that record, I was drawn to the softness and richness of Laucan's voice. By the time I had vocals from Laucan, I was already in a production headspace that had been shaped by the sonic palette I associated with his voice and lyricism. I ended up writing an arrangement which carries the same cadence as a lullaby to accompany Laucan's words. What you hear on that track are actually vocals from a demo he’d already written, which he then allowed me to rework into something that has become a stand-out moment on the album.
“úna bhán” feels more from a folk tradition but changed into this beautiful drone. Can you talk about the process of writing that and the work with Lorcán Mac Mathúna?
It was a real privilege to have such a talented and somewhat elusive voice on this track. I came across Lorcán during a period when I was listening to a lot of sean-nós singing (unaccompanied, solo songs). The character of his voice is completely transfixing - his delivery is so gentle and natural, but there's also something about the way he sings that feels totally ancient and sacred. Úna Bhán is one of a few songs Lorcán chose to record his own version of, and even the unaccompanied takes of his voice felt incredibly special to hear. I wanted to create an arrangement that complemented the organic purity of that feeling, and something that was a sort of deep consolation for the words he was singing.
Lorcán chose this version of a love song first transcribed in the late 19th century in the style of a lament, which tells the story of Tomás Láidir Mac Coisdealbha, grieving the death of Úna Bhán, or “Fair Úna.” In Lorcán’s words, the narrative follows Tomás, exhausted and torn by days of sleepless grief, as he swims to an island on Lough Key where Úna had been buried, to lay on her grave.
I began by adding textures made from resonating the skin of the bodhrán with a rubber mallet, which I then ran through modelling software so that the drum took on the quality of a stringed instrument swelling and shimmering in an atmosphere that cradles Lorcán’s voice. According to the song's legend, Úna’s ghost soon returns to Tomás, who also dies shortly after. It felt fitting to end the track with a coda to capture that final moment in the story.
(Thank you to Ian, press photos by Claire Nash)