words//shaun oppedisano
Niamh Corcoran’s music strikes me as something is something special for the Dublin underground music scene. Her half-dreamscape, half-electronic sounds are so chillingly awesome that I really wish she was instead here in the US. Though relatively unknown in these parts, Niamh has been playing plenty of great shows and certainly has a lot on her mind. I hope her solo endeavor Angkorwat is able to permeate foreign boundaries and put people everywhere into an infectious daze. Take a listen to her jams and thoughts here and you’ll get why I’m such a fan.
Angkorwat – My Three Beautiful Children [live]
Angkorwat is a reference to the Angkor Wat temple, right? What made you come to this name?
I always knew I’d start a solo project when the right time came, and Angkorwat was the name I was always drawn to. I love the temple itself–its architecture has no Western influences according to what I’ve read, and it survived a brutal history. It’s those facts about the temple that relate to the name I gave the project. I don’t use any Eastern imagery, it’s usually pretty distasteful when Western acts do that.
Your music is mostly electronically based and is pretty layered. Where do you usually start in writing a song?
I usually write from the middle of a very bad or good mood/situation. I start off with a compulsive single-line melody in my head which I adapt with basslines and awkward rhythms. The vocals are usually complementary rather than the centre of the song. I try to keep it simple but it rarely ends up so. It makes playing a good gig impossible unless I have the co-operation of at least two other musicians. Playing live with limitations is incredibly frustrating, especially when you have to use backing tracks or a laptop to fill in the gaps, which I hate doing.
You recently got to play in Dublin with Panda Bear. Tell me about that night.
It was surreal. It’s weird trying to play songs you wrote on your bed at 4am in the dark to a big venue, never mind opening for Panda Bear who is at the top of his game. Mainly I just felt incredibly privileged. He’s a nice guy.
What’s your dream collaboration?
Throbbing Gristle or John Cale.
Will people ever get over the Irish/English feud?
Who is people? I think other problems are there for England and Ireland individually. As for Northern Ireland, I moved to the Republic six years ago to escape the culture (or lack thereof). The distance is helpful because you get to see the situation for what it is. I sometimes wonder if the fact that the island is split in two has a psychological effect on the people living on it. When I moved down South I suddenly realised that armed footsoldiers and car bombs aren’t a staple of everybody’s childhood. And considering my experience was very sheltered, I can’t imagine what it was like for people living in badly affected areas. Still, when people tell me I should move country altogether I always disagree.
You talked in another interview about there not being enough women making this type of electronic music. Why do you think this is?
I can’t give a definitive answer to that. In that interview I was talking about Irish electronica in particular, but there are several Irish women making good music right now, so I can’t complain. More broadly, it seems like women making music suffer from the media scrutinizing the fact of their gender. This might be fine for those women who are writing music that is feminist or about female experiences, but a lot of people (including myself) are just musicians who also happen to be female. That scrutiny is unattractive and irritating to start with. You never hear the words “male musician.” I don’t know if that’s actual sexism or just journalists scraping the barrel so they can make the artist they’re covering more “interesting.” It’s getting better of course, but it’s just irritating that women doing anything important in music seem to be expected to answer for an entire history of suffering/vindication, when all they want to do is to get on with it. On the other hand, if a female musician wants to deal with the history of gender inequality, then I think that should be regarded as a worthwhile contribution. But I personally got into writing because I loved music, not because I’m a feminist.
Besides that, there’s the tendency in electronic music to regard anything less than total proficiency/accuracy as incompetency, which is something I totally reject. I think this scares off a lot of beginners who love electronic sounds but aren’t gadget-obsessed. Gadget-obsession seems to be male territory and the experts in the field tend to be male. I haven’t worked with a female sound engineer yet, for example. But I’ve said before somewhere that I don’t want to make a career out of mastering machines–it would be joyless and boring. For women who do want to master machines, I think it’s more of a big boys’ club than a “no girls!” club. I’ve never encountered any outright discrimination myself and I hope it stays that way.
You primarily started with recording music through your laptop and Garageband. Have you been sampling more live instruments recently?
Yes. Garageband instruments served me extraordinarily well but I’m bored to death of the software. I was working exclusively from digital synths and midi for gigs and recording as a way of distancing myself from previous training in classical music, just to see what would happen. What I want to do next is to write songs (not necessarily under the Angkorwat name) specifically with a view to playing them live, which would be the total opposite of the earlier songs which have up to 13 layers each simply because I never thought I’d let anybody hear them, let alone be asked to play them live.
Have you ever watched the show Skins? Is it bad that it’s my biggest guilty pleasure right now?
Don’t you wish your teen years resembled that show even slightly? Because mine didn’t.
Have you ever played music in / visited the States?
I went to Atlanta on an orchestra trip when I was a teenager. We stayed in this suburban couple’s house, filled their basement with cigarette smoke, listened to a lot of Janis Joplin and ate junk. The South is scary. You’d never guess from the way the city is that so many great bands come out of it. I want to travel around the States, but I’d be very careful about avoiding certain cities.
Name drop me a few damn good underground Dublin bands.
We have a great underground right now. Patrick Kelleher, Children Under Hoof, Hunter-Gatherer, Porn On Vinyl, Catscars and Legion of Two are all doing great things.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
It’s pretty boring, but I’d like to live in an old Dublin house and put a studio in it that is totally mine. I’d like a bearable job, maybe teaching because it allows for lots of time off to travel and tour. I’d like to work as fast or as slow as I need to and build up a body of work over my lifetime that I can be proud of. As you can see I graduated last year and had to get real…
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To check out more from Angkorwat, go to her MySpace page!
