ONE of the trickiest things about leaving home is the fear that your identity will be subsumed into the host culture of your destination. This can happen subtly and in a thousand different ways, and the tension it elicits can often lead to the end of relationships, the softening of family ties, the breakup of friendships and the negligence of important home events.
Being an emigrant can be a lonely business, in other words. It leaves us grappling for cultural touchstones to keep our connections live, even if it’s just a song that plays every so often as we go about our daily chores.
For people of my grandparents’ generation, it took the form of Luke Kelly’s rendition of ‘Carrickfergus’. For people of my parents’ generation, it was The Pogues or U2, or any of the dozen other Irish-inspired supergroups and singers who wrote their way to immortality by providing a soundtrack for the great exoduses of the 1980s and 1990s.
For me, it’s the body of work of Clare-based electronic musician and multi-instrumentalist Daithí Ó Drónaí, better known as Daithí. I discovered Daithí’s music quite by accident during the second wave of COVID lockdowns in 2021. I’d just returned to London after a year of living with my wife in my mother in law’s house in Belfast, and was feeling despondent about the prospect of a renewed stint in England.
Daithí’s incorporation of traditional Irish music, poetic voiceovers and beautiful vocals into what otherwise might be described as ambient house or IDM felt revolutionary. His tracks felt both nostalgiac and future-facing, present yet somehow unattainable, in a way which would satisfy cultural critic Mark Fisher’s definition of what he called hauntological music.
Describing Burial’s 2007 album ‘Untrue’ in his seminal 2014 essay collection ‘Ghosts of my Life’, Fisher wrote that it was: “Haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.”
I can think of no better encapsulation of Daithí’s music, or indeed, of the Irish emigrant experience as a whole. For that wistful sense being between two idealised poles—that is, the past as represented by Ireland and the future represented by wherever one has moved to—will be familiar to anyone who has woken up somewhere and realised that they are not quite home.
Last week, Daithí released his new single ‘Ferry2Aran’ and it once again felt as though he had tapped into that liminal part of my brain which has become such a fixture for negotiating the in-betweenness of the emigrant experience.
There is more than a touch of the Café del Mar or Todd Terje about it, with its syncopated funk groove and bossa nova vocals, but once again Daithí undercuts our expectations about halfway through with a subtle—though notable—drop in tempo, introducing just a hint of melancholy into the otherwise joyous uplift of his beats.
This is an artist who has evolved as Ireland has, and it’s fitting that he should now start playing with textures of a more international flavour. But the essence of his music will always be bound up for me in its evocations of an idealised Otherworld; that sense which Oisín must have felt as he stepped down from his horse and realised that he was no longer in Tír na nÓg.
See More: Burial, Café Del Mar, Daithi, Daithí Ó Drónaí, Mark Fisher
