Second Square To None

This week we have Enda Bates, a composer/guitarist/producer who releases solo material as Fairlights & is an active composer of contemporary music, as well as being involved with the Spatial Music Collective and the group Spook of the Thirteenth Lock.

I was introduced to noisy guitar bands like My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth and the Jesus & Mary Chain by my older brothers when I was very young, before I even started playing guitar. This kind of noisy, experimental but melodic music has been a big influence on everything I’ve done since. I played in a couple of bad, grunge cover bands in school and this was definitely a formative experience, those gigs were terrifying but absolutely addictive. I didn’t really start writing music until later. I got a loan of a little cassette 4-track recorder around 2000 and it was quite a revelatory experience to be able to actually write and record my own music. Once again I was hooked and I haven’t really stopped writing and recording since then.

I've been releasing music as Fairlights with the Alphabet Set Collective since about 2003. The last one was an album of more ambient, instrumental stuff called Quarterworks which came out in 2007. More recently I’ve been writing a lot of contemporary music, string quartets, choral music, surround sound, electronic music, that kind of thing. I also play bass with the alt-trad rock band the Spook of the Thirteenth Lock and recorded and produced our first album back in 2008. We've been busy gigging all over the place and we're due to start recording the second album in August. I'm also working on a new Fairlights album of more up-tempo, vocal-driven stuff which should be seeing the light of day over the coming months.

For me, the process changes quite considerably, depending on what it is I'm doing, and I really like this variety. Its great to be able to a full band thing with the Spooks or in Miriam Ingram’s band, but its also nice to be able to write and perform my own stuff with Fairlights too. The composition stuff is a different process again as you're writing for other musicians and other instruments. The great thing about writing contemporary music is that you can really use any type of instrument, any style of music or any type of technology, its completely freedom really. Writing this kind of music is perhaps a bit more thought out, whereas the guitar based stuff is a bit more visceral, sometimes it’s good to just rock out. This track is a bit more like the latter and is probably quite typical of a lot of the Fairlights stuff, using lots of guitar effects and synths.

I tend use a combination of effects pedals and a laptop, along with the guitar. Thanks to ebay I own a slightly silly number of pedals but in truth I use software effects just as much as the pedals. I tend do a lot of processing of instrumental tracks in Max\MSP to create electronic sounds which I then edit and mix back in with the original instrumental tracks. I tend to use quite a bit of spatial, binaural processing too, mainly to create very wide sounds, especially when listened to on headphones.

New Dublin Voices, Summer Tour

Pauper's Lament / A Stealing Sadness for SATBx2 choir

Various dates from Friday, May 28th to Saturday, June 5th.

Premiere performance of a Lyric FM Commission, broadcast date TBA.

The Spatial Music Collective presents the Dublin Guitar Quartet

Smock Alley Theatre, Templebar.

Thursday, August 5th.

A concert for four electric guitars and quadaphonic amplifiers, electronic sounds for eight loudspeakers, and a new work for hexaphonic guitar (www.spatialmc.net).

I'm recording new albums as Fairlights and with the Spook of the Thirteenth Lock at the moment so we don’t have any confirmed gigs right now. I will be performing as Fairlights at the penultimate Ballroom of Romance in July, more details and a new website should be online shortly.