The Irish singer-songwriter's track about exile and shifting dimensions is accompanied with visual artist Locky Morris's meditative footage of intertidal mudflats
““Unrealtime”, as a song, muses back and forth on what it is to be an exile”, says Cork born, London based musician Cathal Coughlan, describing the ideas behind the closing track from his latest album Song Of Co-Aklan. “Revisiting one’s land of birth as not just a stranger”, he continues, “but possibly as an observer from another dimension. And then, it begins looking on the extent of a person’s whole life from those unrelenting perspectives.”
Song Of Co-Aklan is Coughlan's seventh album, and sees him reunited with fellow Microdisney member Sean O’Hagan, as well as Luke Haines, Rhodri Marsden, Eileen Gogan, Audrey Riley and James Woodrow.
“Some of my most dicey chord changes are subordinated to the simple hypnosis of a frame drum and Sean O’Hagan’s flat-wound “West German” bass guitar”, says Coughlan, as he begins to describe his collaborators’ contributions to this particular track. “The periodic crescendos of realisation are heralded by Nick Allum’s restrained brush drums and a growing plenitude of voices – my own, and those of Eileen Gogan and Sean, each probing in their own way for a reprieve from the certainties of the terse prescriptions heard in the verses.”
“It’s more than fitting that the visuals seen here should have originated in another part of that island, in the masterful minimalism of Locky Morris.”
“I try to stick to a practice of staring at things and letting myself go” says Derry City based artist and musician Morris. “The footage in the film for “Unrealtime” was shot on an intertidal mudflat, on the edges of a large shallow sea lough on the north coast of Ireland, close to home. Seldom can I get the idea though of the huge capped city dump lying nearby out of my mind. The weather wasn’t good, that black pipe was under the arm one minute and caught by the wind the next. Who knew that this chance happening would be used to accompany this beauty of a song by Cathal Coughlan. ‘...post glacial marine transgression...’ I pulled that line from a geological description of the area. Jesus, that could almost be one of Cathal’s arresting lyrics!”
Wire subscribers can read Cathal Coughlan and Sean O’Hagan’s Invisible Jukebox interview in The Wire 447 via the digital archive. The print magazine is also available to buy from our webshop.
