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Traumatic events can sometimes change lives in unexpected ways. In Myles O’Reilly’s case, suffering a serious accident and spending over a year in recovery provided a pathway for his discovery of ambient music. Up until that point, his musical output had focussed predominantly on pop and folk idioms (he was once the guiding light in the Brad Pitt-endorsed Irish underground indie-pop act Juno Falls). He is still capable of writing luminous, gem-like folk songs of the highest quality – see 2022’s Cocooning Heart for proof of that – but he has also developed a parallel career as a purveyor of gauzy, dreamlike ambient instrumentals. Music from the Threshold is the latest in a clutch of compositional albums and the most varied and emotionally resonant yet.
The compositions seem to take inspiration from both Western and Eastern ambient music. At times, they are thick and earthy, with the deep sheen of polished mahogany. At times, they are minimal and chilly. Frequently, the two strands combine to create a sound that has echoes of Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2013 collaborative album, Disappearance. It’s a delicate balance, achieved with apparent effortlessness. Household Chores, for example, pits tinkling, icy top notes against a resonant and oaky background ambience.
Although meditative to its core, there is a paradoxical liveliness to many of O’Reilly’s compositions that is unusual in ambient music. It is fitting that the album is inspired partly by the death of O’Reilly’s cat: cats can change on a whim from the laziest to the liveliest of animals, and this split personality makes its way into these soundscapes in the form of Watching the Beautiful Game’s skittering, popping electronics and hazy, slightly decayed background notes. Movement is an important feature. Guiso Walks the Kerry Way is rangy and exploratory in a way that ambient music normally isn’t, but it never forsakes its calmness.
The way these tracks are built and layered means that each has its own distinct profile, which means that the mood changes subtly from piece to piece. A Holy Tone, as its name suggests, is reverent, dense, though not without a sense of play and an engaging twitchiness. The melodic overtones of Midnight Art Attack have a drifting, dreamlike quality, improvisational and random-sounding, like the musical equivalent of automatic writing. Noah Under the Stairs is sinuous and soothing, its tones rippling out in restful contours while the underside grows staticky and papery.
The Visible Soul of the House is perhaps the album’s most dramatic moment: drawn-out synth chords build and shift, hinting at the monumental. The track seems to inhabit deep time, to examine a hyper-extended moment from the perspective of an apparently inanimate object. It is also the most cinematic piece: O’Reilly is a filmmaker, and the whole album has a vivid visual sense but here it becomes more noticeably filmic, more structural, even introducing the eerie idea of a narrative just beyond comprehension. For all its calming qualities, ambient music has the ability to capture strange and uncanny life forces, to tell stories in a deeper and more enigmatic way than with simple human language. It seeps into the cracks between states of consciousness and merges the states of dreaming and wakefulness, life and death.
Myles O’Reilly seems to understand this uncanny power innately, and he puts it to mesmerising use on Music From the Threshold. The final track, One Last Loving Gaze, is short, sad, and almost entirely still. It is a fond but aching farewell, and like everything O’Reilly does here, it is suffused with grace and dignity, strangeness and quiet passion.
Music from the Threshold (2nd September 2024) Self Released
Bandcamp: https://mylesoreilly.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-the-threshold
