root salad f26 Myles O’Reilly
If you’ve seen any good Irish musician films lately, he probably made them, says Cara Gibney
making the visuals,” O’Reilly continued. “We show our hands putting the stuff together and that helps merge the two because when you look at the live perfor- mance you realise it’s [real] people playing [music]. It’s a moment in time... and because we show how we’re making the visual, that’s what allows it to shift seamlessly into live performance.”
hose nice appealing visuals he mentions are masterpieces in understatement. A follower of Werner Herzog, O’Reilly’s style of film pointedly stays in the real world: “[Herzog’s] whole ethos is that everything he films has to be real, so the connection is there. The truest, strongest moment actual- ly is there.” It’s an attitude that permeates O’Reilly’s work. “I veer more towards folk [music] because my style of film is kind of real. I like involving environments [from kitchens, to streets, country lanes, craggy cliffs, or the back of a van at the docks]… I want people to feel like they’re there. With folk music it seems to complement that style of film – folk, world music, ethnic, and traditional obviously, it all seems to comple- ment that style of filming reality, filming things in a real way.”
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hat the work of sought-after music film maker Myles O’Reilly lacks in glamour, it makes up for in the simple,
bare-boned beauty of being honest. It’s an unfiltered eye on the musician, the music and the place. A resolute inclusion of what’s happening right there, right now. We become curious about the onlookers, the smokers, soup kitchens and mobility scooters who pass and stall and resonate through these films. It feeds off the natu- rally occurring soundscape. It fits, and that helps us trust the music and the people we see making the music.
We thought we’d better tell you more about the Dublin-based film maker as he’s been cropping up in fRoots features over the past year. From Ye Vagabonds (“Myles acted as the catalyst for us to become Ye Vagabonds and to start playing more”) to Lisa O’Neill, of whom he has been a fan since first hearing her sing years ago in a campsite at Electric Picnic. But visit his web- site, Myles O’Reilly’s Arbutus Yarns, and you’ll find a litany of music video and docu- mentary with artists including Radie Peat and Darragh Lynch, Glen Hansard, The
Staves, and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh. You’ll also find episodes of the online Irish music showcase This Ain’t No Disco, on which O’Reilly collaborates with DJ and visual artist Donal Dineen – an institution in the Irish music scene and a mentor of O’Reilly.
“I make music documentaries detailing the creative process for the musicians I’m filming,” O’Reilly told me, “explaining the process in which they record music, and write music, and the way they perform music… the flip side of what I do is that I create nice appealing visuals for the record- ed songs, which is a completely different discipline… With This Ain’t No Disco I’ve fused the two. I’ve introduced the music video into a documentary narrative, and these are a chance for musicians to talk and inform the audience in a documentary way. Then it just bursts with music video seg- ments, albeit that those segments are live performances… it’s a coming together of the two polar things I do – documentary and music video, it’s really a fusing of those two different things.”
Nothing is hidden. The viewer is invited to witness the work behind the scenes. “I think what helps is that we show how we’re
“All I want to do is show music to be that thing that can be communicated there in front of you,” he explained. “I want peo- ple to feel that what they’re watching is lit- erally outside their front door, or window, or the building next door. Something that’s just a hair’s breadth away from them, in the real world. That’s how they’ll receive music in a much more powerful way. That’s how I feel it at its most powerful. That’s all I’m try- ing to do, to mirror that in two dimensions as best as I can.”
2019 is busy, offering a lot of location scouting, research and discovery for Myles O’Reilly: “I’ll be listening to a lot of people, asking people to send me music, and asking who they like,” he explained. He’ll also be filming four more episodes and a new series of This Ain’t No Disco, as well as curating a showcase of emerging talent at the Body & Soul festival on June’s Summer Solstice. He’s working on a series of videos with Glen Hansard in Paris, and don’t forget the Ye Vagabonds film from last year’s tour of islands off the coast of Ireland. “I’m bring- ing out a documentary in the summer where we go on that journey with them. Where we get to hear seven songs – one performed on each Island.”
Try to catch some of this, you can thank
me later.
arbutusyarns.net
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