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Enjoy the entire Murals album from MDH
http://mdhmusicuk.bandcamp.com/album/murals
I’m proud to be from Northern Ireland, and this album is my labour of love for the place.
As everyone knows, it has a troubled history. My generation didn’t want to talk about it – it was boring, embarrassing even, to us. But then again, we knew we weren’t Irish, which was what most people across the water labelled us as, not giving it a second thought.
It was this identity vacuum – either you quietly accepted the “Irish” label, or you got into a complicated explanation that tended to run in circles and have people nodding off – that led me to engage more deeply with Northern Irishness. You realise that although there is no neat label you can slap on yourself, the are loads of associations, affiliations and belongings once you scratch the surface.
Then follows the history. If the politics is in perpetual tight-lipped gridlock, this is only because the details of recent history are so copious and vivid. Thus, no neat story, no winners and losers, no war even, just a more amorphous “conflict”, yet, again once you scratch the surface the kaleidoscope starts rolling around. Intimidatingly complicated on first encounter, and always more sensitive than you think, but really, really interesting.
It has taught me a crucial lesson – one most people know but precious few really understand and keep at the front of their minds – that there are at least 2 sides to every story. And as you look closer, especially into real people’s lives, the kaleidoscope turns again.
So this is my response to all of that. It is angry and opinionated, coy and cheeky, political (if it’s really important to you, you can probably detect my biases, such as they are), sentimental and cynical. But it is intentionally inconsistent in its perspective, duplicitous, feckless and fickle, and it is one long track – no event can be isolated, each thing blurs into the next – like real life is.
MDH
Michael Humphrey
Born Bangor, Co. Down
Hither Green, London
2017
Review by Colin Marshall:
\"I don’t really know very much about Northern Ireland. At university in Manchester I befriended a girl who had been raped by prominent local members of a paramilitary organisation. And later I had a friend trying to make a home as a father and husband, still debilitated, harrowed, from serving in Northern Ireland with the army. So what should I know about it?
But it’s not only Northern Ireland I don’t know much about; I don’t know much about Michael Humphrey or music either.
Still, I have a feeling that Murals is a masterpiece.
I can listen to it over and again, understanding nothing, like I did those days, a child watching Northern Ireland on English TV in my room: the protestants with funny hats, sashes, gloves, parade-marches with drums and scary pictures on walls with balaclavas, guns, white hands and red lines; the IRA-side with angry voices urging the freedom fight, suffering, hunger striking, false imprisonment, uprisings and curfews. I was transfixed by Northern Ireland on TV and, thinking about it, Murals doubtless captures my attention and imagination because it is contemporary Northern Irish folk music which evokes those sights and sounds.
This folk music is of a folk sick of civil war. And it is folk music which is bonfire music. The bonfire has been carefully constructed and all the TV stuff listed above certainly makes for a grand- looking bonfire. And, like a bonfire, something is being constructed here which is also at the same time being dismantled. Something – an accent, a language – is objectified and thus lost, taken apart, let go; better, consigned to the flames. In this case, it is who you were, which was who you were meant to be, a soldier-boy for grand ideas. But no one was ever made to be a soldier for something they were not made to love: home. In this way, there’s a moment the bonfire is truly beautiful; namely when the object is on fire, a moment in which you see the fine structure of the thing stripped to its essence. On the CD, it’s the vocal arrangements which are this. In this moment, the bonfire is not a destruction but a purgation. And then there is a new voice born from these fires, which are the album’s folk songs proper, a new free voice.
It is the brilliance of the construction of the folk music as Northern Irish, together with the universality of the purgatorial effect, which is what makes Murals a masterpiece.\"
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