A review from the Journal of Music – Trá Pháidín at Stiúideo Cuan on 11 July.

Peadar-Tom Mercier is kneeling with his electric guitar, holding a book in Irish, musing to himself. He drops a comment about the housing crisis – the short-hand of a generation. The room is full. The stage is stretched to hold two drum kits either side.

Walking towards Stiúideo Cuan, I could see the different crowd. Tattooed, mulleted, sun-kissed – where have they come from? The summer concerts at the An Spidéal venue have been running for three years. Normally we are seated in rows, witnessing the depth of today’s traditional music and song, but this evening the space is cleared for another side of Conamara, the Trá Pháidín journey.

Trá Pháidín formed before the pandemic and in 2022 released their musical psychogeography album An 424. Everyone in the west knows the 424 bus, which travels along the coast from Galway to Carna via An Cheathrú Rua. Although it has improved now, it has always been a particular type of Gaelic transport hell: drunk-filled, too slow, too cold, too hot, too expensive. Every teenager from Indreabhán to Leitir Móir endures it until they learn to drive. Trá Pháidín’s album is full of atmospheric strands of this 424 journey, mixed in with stories of the characters on board.

On stage at Stiúideo Cuan, the night before the Twelfth of July marches in the North, where a bonfire burnt an effigy of refugees, Trá Pháidín engage in parody: they are wearing bowler hats and orange sashes along with sunglasses. The music moves like a minimalistic folk tram, working through snippets of melody and pulsing rhythms. Trumpet player Conal Hanamy has ‘RTÉ’ written across his sash. This is a generation overtly politicised, picking and flicking at society, carving out an identity from the septic whirlpool of today’s permacrises. Gaza, climate change, social media toxicity, unaffordable housing – is it any wonder the liminal space of the 424 seems like a refuge?

Set a Trí
Almost the entire first half of the Stiúideo Cuan gig is one piece, ‘Set a Trí’, which they plan to record this autumn; it merges passages of post-rock with fragments of melody, and then between each section it winnows down to Mercier’s mellow guitar, before transitioning into another passage of traditional-music-type fragments, motifs on clarinet (Ultan Lavery) and trumpet (Hanamy), and shakers and low beats from the percussionists (Ruairí De Búrca and Paul Leonard). Periodically, Mercier interjects with passages of Irish. Later, he reads out a flutter of a word from the Kerry Gaeltacht and asks the audience to repeat it, telling him there is no English for this. He urges them: ‘Níl aon Ghaeilge agat muna bhfuil traidisiún agat.’ 

Trá Pháidín has ten members, six of whom played in An Spidéal (the sixth was Micheál Fitzgerald on bass), but although they are from all over Ireland – Galway, Cork, Kerry, Sligo and Offaly – they speak Irish and, through Mercier’s lyrics, capture the modern culture of the Gaeltacht, combining it with the folk, drone, doom, punk and new classical influences that make up the Irish scene. The anarchic energy of the Conamara village of An Cheathrú Rua, where Mercier is from, also seems a key influence. An Cheathrú Rua is made up of multiple bóithríní, all spreading out from the village. Every now and then, the energy from the surrounding townlands converges on the village and then disperses again leaving a quiet, neglected village. Trá Pháidín’s music captures that split spirit, similar to the way Rís, another band from the village, has. At one stage, Mercier renames one of their pieces ‘Meas-tú an bhfuil An Cheathrú Rua fós racist?’, making reference to the protests against asylum-seekers bussed into the village last year. 

In the second half of the concert, the band are now wearing yellow hi-viz tops. The tempo increases; the audience moves closer to the stage. A number of the pieces from An 424 appear – the Latin rhythms of ‘m’anam go b’ea’ and the Gaelic narrative echoes of ‘Monty Phádraic Jude’. For another hour, I stand out of the way of the dancers and find myself transfixed by these long atmospheric sets that so obviously come out of the Gaeltacht but also connect in with the wider music scene.

Trá Pháidín are part of something new in the Gaeltacht, an embrace of the alternative, the avant-garde, the absurd, and somehow bringing Irish with them. The official Gaeltacht has become weighed down with language plans, strategies and PR announcements. It would be easy to forget that it all means nothing unless a new generation makes the place its own. That is certainly what Trá Pháidín are doing.

For upcoming concerts at Stiúideo Cuan, visit www.stiuideocuan.ie. For Trá Pháidín, visit https://trawfawdeen.bandcamp.com.