Rún is an Irish trio operating at the intersection of experimental music, improvisation and practices with a distinctly ritualistic character. The band consists of Tara Baoth Mooney, Diarmuid MacDiarmada and Rían Trench – artists from different creative worlds whose collaborative work is based on attentive listening, relationships and being together in a specific place and time. Their music grows out of folk roots, drone, psychedelia, doom heaviness and subtle electronics, but does not seek to synthesise genres as an end in itself. Rather, it is a process – open, elusive and beyond intellectual schemata.
The name Rún, meaning mystery, secret, and also love in Irish, points to the area where the trio locates its practice – beyond what is measurable and unambiguous. Here, sound becomes a tool for contact with the invisible, with memory, mourning, community and borderline experiences, placing music between the sacred and the profane. The recording location – Meadow Studio on the east coast of Ireland – also plays an important role, as it is conducive to concentration, experimentation and the long process of discovering form. In conversation, the members of Rún talk about their working method, the importance of improvisation, spirituality without dogma, and how sound, voice and image can create a coherent, living whole.
Artur Mieczkowski
Artur Mieczkowski: The name Rún in Irish can mean mystery, secret, but also love – what intention did you want to convey with this name?
Diarmuid MacDiarmada: For me it’s about the reality of a world that is not material or measurable, a world that is not subject to reason, that cannot be controlled by the ego. We exist in this underlying world like a cork on the ocean, as Brian Wilson put it so beautifully, long ago. It’s about an awe-filled, sometimes fearful respect, and a willingness to dialogue with forces much greater than ourselves.
Rían Trench: It’s omnipotent and illusive as a word. It seems to convey what we do together well.
Tara Baoth Mooney: In one way the choice of Rún was a deliberate attempt to avoid a specific intentionality. It has a porous quality that allows its meaning to expand, contract or transform. Less like a word, more like a possibility.
A.M.: Your music combines a very broad stylistic spectrum—from folk roots, through drone and doom psychedelia, to experimental and electronic music. How does the process of combining these elements work in practice?
Rían: Not consciously at all to begin with. We write together in a very non-intellectual manner building ideas from sparse primitive elements. As we progress towards recording we generally start to become more conscious of stylistic traits in the music and parallels we can explore.
Diarmuid: It’s a blend of our tastes and our roots, the music comes from the place where we live as well as the sounds we enjoy. It’s also a product of how our individual explorations into experimental forms and various idioms all come together in surprising ways.
Tara: I agree with Rian, in that it is not a conscious choice to take and combine elements. There is an understanding that the elements we each bring as individuals are often only scaffolds for us to build on. As pieces progress the scaffolds become less important and the animus takes over.
A.M.: The contemporary experimental scene increasingly explores the sacred and transcendence through sound—do you feel that Rún fits into this trend, and if so, how do you perceive the meaning of the sacred in music today, also in the context of social and cultural changes?
Diarmuid: We’ve seen a very rapid devaluing of traditional religious values over the last six decades, and it seems that as rapidly as the old models seem to disappear, new ideas and identities rush in to fill the gap, from psychedelia to New Age to modern cults to conspiracy-based mythologies, all of which harness our need to make meaning out the world we find ourselves in. We (Rún) are certainly engaged in the same work – a non-traditional, personal attempt to deal with some pretty big questions.
Rían: I can’t say I’ve noticed a trend. I guess the human experience is inherently sacred and we’re attempting to explore it in ways that resonate with us as a trio. The dawning of completely autonomous technology seems an opportunity to go back into our fundamental human experiences more then ever.
Tara: I am more interested in the way transcendence can be an escape or an immanent yearning to stay in the uncomfortable place and that through shared attention, respect and grief something sacred can occur. So music and sound for us three – and for the expanded community – can be a way of sitting together in threshold liminal spaces between the sacred and the profane, or human and non-human, or life and death.
A.M.: Your music is sometimes described as ritualistic and spiritual. Which artistic or philosophical inspirations were most important to you when working on Rún – literature, mysticism, dream work, trance experiences?
Rían: I make a conscious effort to leave anything external to us out of the picture. For me it’s very much about just being in the room together. I try to hold focus and not get concerned with anything else but what we are doing right now.
Diarmuid: Carl Jung, G.I. Gurdjieff, Hildegard von Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Rumi, Comte de Lautreamont, Beckett, Meister Eckhardt, to name a few.
Tara: D has mentioned many of our common wells of inspiration above. Again there is not a conscious intention to draw on these inspirations when we are together. However, In our individual worlds we do experience, learn and sometimes bring abstracted knowledge of these rich voices to Rún. Personally I am curious about the relationship between dreamstate and story. Stories from dreams, experience, working with plants, cooking, singing all have synchronous connections that reveal themselves and those moments are particularly lovely. Pupil started as a long dream based on an experience. When it was written down ‘the pupil stills’ was a recurring mantra. That one line became a whole section of the first track on the album.
A.M.: My favorite is the longest track on the album, Caoineadh—what ideas, images, or emotions were behind the creation of this song?
Diarmuid: Tara is the best person to describe the melodic and lyrical core of the song. The setting comprises the minimal riff explorations of The Necks, the cosmic jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders and the sound of overloaded tape oblivion of William Basinski, although my own angle on that sound came from a marvellous collaboration between Pascal Comelade and David Cunnningham called ‘Musique par Correspondence’. These were some of the stars that guided our way.
Rían: I follow Tara with a bowed guitar in most of Caoineadh and try to answer her vocal with the same inflection and intensity to create this kind of emotional echo. It was only after tracking that I noticed it had this kind of high altitude feeling. Like being up in the mountains. I enjoy that. A lot of things in our music are discovered after performance really. There’s very little design in what finally comes to pass.
Tara: There is a duty of care built into the whole record through the cathartic nature of the last track. The Caoineadh is a lament based on the ‘Caoineadh Airt O Laoighre’ which was written by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in 1773 as a love poem to her dead husband. It existed in my creative life for many years before it finally ‘became’ through Rún. The lament in the Irish tradition is often a shared acknowledgement of joy and loss. The voice and instrumentation in this track particularly express sorrow and the devastation and dignity of grief, coupled with softness and love. Going back to that idea of transcendence earlier, it feels like a release from the fractiousness of some of the earlier tracks into a sort of celestial cohesiveness.
A.M.: You worked at Meadow Studio on the east coast of Ireland, owned by Rian Trench—how did this unique, “homey” space influence the creative process and the dynamics of your collaboration?
Diarmuid: It’s hard to imagine this work happening in the same way if we were working in some urban, regular studio, watching the clock and dealing with third parties who may or may not ‘get it’. The Meadow is a beautiful space in a beautiful setting and while we don’t have unlimited time together, the atmosphere is very focussed and relaxed at the same time.
Tara: Hugely. Rian opens up his home and studio for us and we enter knowing it is soft and special. That holding space is about forging and being in community together within Rún as well as being in a creativite relationship.
Rían: I’ve operated the meadow for many years. You could describe it as a home with studio facilities. It afforded us the opportunity to try some recording methods that really shaped the sonic identity of the album. I’m not sure we could have done that anywhere else given how much experimenting I needed to do before it felt correct.
A.M.: Tara’s biography is very eclectic – from choral music, through folk, to film and visual arts. How do these experiences influence Rún’s common sound language today? In your artistic practice, you often work with “hidden stories” and matter – textiles, the body, landscape. Do these ideas translate into improvisation or narrative in the band’s music?
Tara: Certainly yes, I am very lucky to be able to bring certain artistic yearnings into the Rún community. I don’t distinguish between my ways of manifesting art. They are all different expressions of a familiar creative itch that I have around connectedness and meaning-making. Something many of us try to explore in our lives, a way to find and make meaning. I’m interested in invisible embossings that sound or an object or textile can hold long after an interaction. In the same way, Holy wells (and the special trees that grow beside them) are often decorated with remnants of cloth acting like sympathetic magic, where an exchange has taken place, known only to the tree and the person. or the way that the Shinto Festival of broken sewing needles is honouring the long gone other half of the needle- and the cloth it brought together. There are things to be sung and incanted over and with all of this.
A.M.: Diarmuid, your collaboration with Nurse With Wound on the album Lung Oysters—on which you appear alongside Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, and Matt Waldron—is an interesting experience at the intersection of experimental psychedelia and a free approach to sound. How did this experience influence your approach to musical work, and will elements of this collaboration appear in the sound or working method of ?
Diarmuid: I encountered NWW around the turn of the 90’s and it became clear to me quite quickly that this work described an imaginative space like no other work does: a world of darkness, absurdity, genuine belly-laugh humour, confusion, naivete, sophistication, beauty, grotesquerie. It’s always been a touchstone as well as an education. There’s already a presence of that in the Rún soundworld.
A.M.: Rían, your work combines many roles—from sound engineering and music production to film and exploring human impulses through art. How does the perspective gained from these different fields influence your work with Rún and the shaping of the band’s sound? Do the specifics of working at Meadow Studio and your non-musical interests translate into how you create and record material?
Rían: I’ve always tried to engage in as many varied practices as possible and I think ultimately it’s all the one practice of obtaining fluency. The more adaptive you are, the more you can explore and discover, so I guess I train myself to adapt in all of these activities. Being able to drop what you’re doing at any moment and change direction is crucial in collaboration. For any stage of the process I’ll try to throw new elements at myself even if that’s untypical combinations of familiar things. It means that you’re always in a sense of discovery and I’ve learnt that feelings of discovery translate through the music.
A.M.: What can we expect from Rún in the future – new albums, further exploration of improvisation, or perhaps an expansion into performance art or visual elements?
Diarmuid: We’re casting our creative net very widely at the moment, we’ve amassed an amount of new material already with no sense at all of how it might hang together. The album we released last year pretty much told us what it was going to be in a way that was not accepting any argument, we just had to do as we were told LOL. Right now we’re enjoying a zone of creative play. The artwork for the album was very much a part of our visual expression, along with having a hand in the videos, they are very much part of the overall work. We plan to do a lot more of this.
Rían: I’m gonna get very excited and say all of the above.
Tara: Me too…!
A.M.: Thank you very much for the interview. I wish you the best of luck with your plans.
Rían: Thanks so much for having us!
Diarmuid: Thank you for the thoughtful questions. I hope we get to play in Poland someday.
Tara: Thanks Artur, it was lovely to answer your questions.