The Louth Contemporary Music Society is delighted to be returning to live music on Sunday May 8 at 3 p.m., at Carlingford Heritage Centre. Tickets are available here.

For this special occasion LCMS has secured the Irish première of a major work by the American composer Michael Pisaro-Liu: his ninety-minute voyage into sound and silence “asleep, wind, voice, poe”. Live music, though? You might think that these days, with Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud and the rest, you can find any music you want online. Isn’t that right?

Not exactly. Sometimes you just have to be there. In the sound. In the space the sound is creating around you – you and others you didn’t know before you came. All of you brought together by the sound.

Pisaro-Liu has been creating music of this kind throughout the last three decades, an expert in judging how much sound – how little sound – is needed to nudge the silence into colour. A piano tone here. A percussion chime there. A chanted syllable, from a text that has been, as it were, dissolved in water.

You have to be there. The sound is not a message but an environment, and it includes recordings made in and around the place where the performance is to take place. The lap of the tide. The low hum of an ancient church ringing in the wind.

Taking part also will be finely tuned musicians, members of the London group Apartment House appearing in Ireland for the first time.On this occassion Apartment House will be joined by David Bremner and David Stalling. The distinguished Irish actress Olwen Fouéré will voice the dissociated words and syllables of thoughts on solitude by Edgar Allan Poe and the Belgian writer Raoul Vaneigem.

Sometimes you just have to be there.

The concert will take place on Sunday 8 May 2022 at 3pm in the Carlingford Heritage Centre, Carlingford Louth. Tickets will be on sale from the Heritage Centre or online here.

Funded by the Arts Council and financially supported by Create Louth.

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