Last year Prime Cut and The MAC brought BAFTA award-winning writer Jack Thorne’s hard-hitting play Mydidae to life as part of the Ulster Bank Belfast International Arts Festival. Telling the story of two ordinary people on a not so ordinary day – this is a tale of love and loss in a super stripped back setting.
Commissioned to write a collection of songs for the play by Prime Cut, self-taught multi-instrumentalist Martin Byrne has just released an eight track album of music which aimed to match the play’s stark and stripped back style.
In order to achieve this, Byrne limited himself instrumentally, using only guitar, strings and piano alongside a few other elements, and the results are quite startling.
Throughout the eight tracks, a gentle picture is painted – one of subtle fragility, yet with a serious sense of foreboding. From the almost Spanish sounding guitar of Theme 1 to the impish Leaving Flowers, there’s a vulnerability in these tracks that really tells its own story. Each track has elements that mirror aspects of each other, but no two are quite the same. Over the space of 20 minutes, an almost dream-like experience is created forming a separate yet cohesive piece of work.
Having just earned a Masters degree in Sonic Arts (with Distinction) and winning an award for International Audio Artist at the Radical dB Festival in Zaragoza, Spain, Byrne certainly knows what he’s doing. Not only do these tracks paint a haunting picture in terms of the play’s main themes of loss and struggle, but they also manage to stand alone in their own right as an interesting and intriguing collection of music.
Written, performed and recorded, entirely by Byrne it is in pieces like Drowning Part 1 that we can really appreciated his true talent. From the discordant piano to the almost buzzing fly-like nuances in the background, the madness sets in and we are transported to a dark and confusing headspace, only to be reprised later on in a much more toned down Drowning Part 2.
Aside from the traditional elements of piano and guitar, there are a few interesting additions, such as the splashing and sloshing heard in Theme 2 juxtaposed with some more electronic sounding noises.
For a uniquely composed collection of music for theatre, Mydidae is a surprising and entertaining soundscape, one which combines musicality with psychology and the result is a thoughtful and provocative assemblage that is equal parts eerie and unsettling.
