Irish psych-folk singer Aoife Wolf’s reflects “the perpetual conflict” she feels “between the draw of the countryside and its confronting silence.” Drawing on influences from Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins, and PJ Harvey, Wolf has just revealed her latest track ‘A Ringing in the Ear.’ A masterfully unravelling effort, it’s a dark spellbinding meditation on the hidden pitfalls of romance. At once wistful, mournful, sombre, delicate and dense, Wolf’s vocals float on top of an Angelo Badalamenti style riff, both serene and quietly haunting as she sings “I’ll never fall in love again’” and “I’ll never have a happy end.” Nestling with a womb-like intense underwater quality Wolf is bathed in red like a Twin Peaks lounge singer in her latest track. It is dark, dreamy, haunting and blissfully serene, bathing in bohemian elegance.
The song has the depth and layers of the bogs that raised her. Like Seamus Heaney who celebrated how history was preserved in the bogs, Aoife Wolf preserves history in her art, weaving the folk traditions of the past into the indie traditions of the present with timeless elegant modernity, seamlessly blending the thematic complexities into a willow woven whole. For all the beauty, there is a haunting darkness at its core like the bog bodies, sleeping, fully formed in the belly of the bog.
Speaking about the upcoming single, Belfast-based Wolf said: “Someone said to me
recently that they enjoyed the “palpable sense of loneliness”. in my songs… ‘A Ringing in the Ear’ is quite literally about loneliness, something at the time I felt could only be drowned out and not really cured like our old pal tinnitus.” Across four minutes, the result is a song softly brimming with candour, and conjuring slowcore every bit as much as artists like Cate Le Bon.
Below is the video by Limerick-based filmmaker Graham Patterson. Seeped in the kind of arcane shadow play and deep-set rural folk energy that runs through Wolf’s music like tightened flax willow, it takes the Julee Cruise influence and sets out to reimagine what Twin Peaks would look like if it was set in Ireland.
Juxtaposing the mummer tradition of rural landscapes with the cityscapes in the video, the loneliness of the song is magnified. Like Heaney digging into the past with his ‘squat pen’ looking simultaneously at the past and present, Wolf is maintaining the mummer tradition in her video, looping it back to a timelessly modern environment with modern choreography that elegantly juxtaposes their traditional moves. In some cases Mummers or Straw Boys were said to bring luck to weddings, it is, therefore, ironic that they are dancing to a song about loneliness bringing a sense of pathos to this video where it works beautifully, floating in red in this dream-like world where past and present intersect. Wolf said,
“I have a fascination with Mummers and masks in general so we got two headdresses
made by a woman in County Leitrim who would only accept cash in the post as a means
of payment,” reveals Wolf, “This song always made me envision a sad kind of dancing, so my dance teacher Vasiliki. choreographed a routine for us to do in the headdresses, which was challenging!”
Once again teaming up with producer Julie McLarnon at her rural Northern Irish analog studio Analogue Catalogue, Wolf teased out the song’s noirish, heavy-hearted sound alongside three lauded Northern Irish musicians: Aaron Shanley, Michael Mormecha (Mojo Fury, Amy Montgomery) and Ronnie McGreevy.
“When we got the band together to record it we immediately thought it had a kind of a Julee Cruise feel to it. So the band played up to that, my mate Ben later added some Rhodes keyboard action and the sad sexy trombone piece that I had my heart set on. I thought the song was done but Julie placed a Korg monophonic synth in front of me with the instructions “I’m going to feed the kids, you write something” and we recorded those parts some minutes later.”
Aoife has recently played Flotations at the National Concert Hall together with a host of high profile gigs across Ireland and Europe. Listen to her acclaimed EP Wetlands here:
The Wetlands – Master by Aoife Wolf (soundcloud.com)
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