Ghost Voltage

GHOST VOLTAGE Peter Murphy, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Basciville, Mirona MaraIn March of this year, writer and performer Peter Murphy (aka Cursed Murphy), composer/violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire, and Cillian and Lorcan Byrne from Basciville, convened in the National Opera House for five days to record an album entitled Ghost Voltage. Weaving elements of memoir, folklore, sci-fi and the supernatural, the text of the piece is a prose-poem requiem for the departed, divided into six parts, illustrated by artist Mirona Mara, documented in film and photographs by Caolan Barron. Ghost Voltage will be released this autumn; Colm and Basciville’s musical score draws on traditional, classical, folk and electronic music to stunning effect. This Wexford Arts Centre performances on Saturday Oct 4th is a rare chance to see the album performed live in tandem with Mirona’s images: it promises to be a singular and special event. Peter Murphy is a writer and performer from Wexford, Ireland. He is the author of two acclaimed novels, John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River (Faber) and numerous short stories, including the audio-drama The Hands of Franky Machine. His journalism and non-fiction have appeared in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Irish Times, Hot Press, Stinging Fly and Winter Papers, for whom he also serves as contributing editor. He performs and records as Cursed Murphy, and has released two albums to date, Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance (2020) and Republic of the Weird (2022), the latter voted spoken word album of the year by Hot Press.  Colm Mac Con Iomaire is a founding member of Kíla and The Frames, and is a prolific violinist and multi-instrumentalist composer. He won the best composer award at the Tokyo Film festival for his score for the Irish documentary feature Steps of Freedom.His score for the feature film Róise & Frank won the 2022 Santa Barbara Audience Award. More recently, he completed the score for the Irish history series From this Small Island and is also composer-in-residence with an environmental organisation called Hometree, working to restore Ireland’s native forests. An animated short he scored for Cartoon Saloon, Late Afternoon, was nominated for an Oscar and won the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Colm released his first solo instrumental record The Hare’s Corner in 2008 to universal acclaim. The follow up And Now the Weather made the Irish top ten, and he toured the record in the USA, Australia and Europe. His third release The River Holds Its Breath was recorded with Bill Whelan, and they performed the album together where it was recorded in Connemara at the Clifden Arts Festival. Colm’s music draws on a wide range of styles and influences, ranging from classical to traditional. He is recording his next album in Wexford. Cillian and Lorcan Byrne formed Basciville in 2015, releasing a succession of singles, two EPs and a debut album to evangelical reviews. Together they set up a production and writing company and have recorded and toured with artists such as Ailbhe Reddy, The Man Whom, Susan O’Neill, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Lisa O Neill, The Ocelots and Lemoncello. Their second album Love in the Time of the State will be released in the coming year. Mirona Mara studied art and journalism in Romania and continued her academic studies in Ireland, where she moved in 2003, and graduated with a first-class Honours Degree in Fine Art. Her work is an exploration of the mind’s inner landscapes, the various shades of human nature, a continual search for raw emotion. With a special interest in charcoal drawing, Mirona has been pushing the limits of story-telling through stop-motion animation. Her book and exhibition The Girl who Sleeps in the Heart of the Tree was launched at the Romanian Embassy in 2023. Ghost Voltage was made possible by a Literature Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.