Dentistry: make an appointment soon

I recently got in touch with Cian Walker and Patrick Fennelly of Irish band Dentistry. Their debut last year released on Forwind Records made quite an impression on me and I got a chance to discuss their approach to making music.

Riaz Agahi: I read somewhere that Dentistry started as a correspondence project, so I was wondering how that all came about and how you feel it has affected your work?

Cian: Yeah, we (myself, Patrick and Jason) had all known each other for a couple of years, we were all working together in a record store and had long talked about doing something together, getting a practice room and jamming but we never got around to doing it. We then realised that it suited everyone to work on ideas at home, email sketches to one another, which we then fleshed out a little more before going into the studio.

Patrick: Yeah we’re not very ‘typical’ as far as bands go. We never could meet up or ‘practice’. In fact, I think we’ve only actually ‘practiced’ twice and one of those times was recording the album. But working the way we do suits us and allows us to produce a very large volume of work.

RA: What sort of impact does this have on the idea of performing live? Was Dentistry ever intended as a project to be performed live?

Patrick: We’ve never done a live set. With so much being improvised it’s tough to do. I know we’re both very particular too and wouldn’t want to do something live unless we were 100% happy with it. Personally I find laptop sets boring and wouldn’t want to just stand around on stage. We use live instruments too so if we were to play live I’d like to do something with them but that takes a lot of work to get right. I’ve always been interested in installations and would like to go down that road. But as I said, we’d both have to be behind it. Saying that we are meant to be touring with our label next summer.

Cian: I have never enjoyed live performance in the past. It’s not something I’ve done a huge amount of, but enough to know that it makes me feel pretty uncomfortable. I’ve always much preferred listening to music at home than live, particularly quiet or slow music, that’s certainly the way I had hoped Vardogr would be experienced. That’s not to say I wouldn’t like to perform live in the future, I would, very much, it would just be a question of trying to figure out how best to present material like this in a way that would be interesting.

RA: How do you make the sounds and does each person have a distinct role?

Patrick: Well we both have different approaches to making music. For the most part I use Ableton live but do use actual synths from time to time. The studio we recorded the album in, third eye, in Dublin, has amazing banks of synths so we used them on Vardogr. At home when I’m making music it usually depends on my mood. Usually though I have an idea and will roll with it. Recently I was using a lot of field recordings and nature sounds; But nothing is ever exclusive and no one has a fixed role.

Cian: I use Ableton Live for arranging, as well as guitar, effects pedals, field recordings, a cheapo Casio keyboard that I’ve had for a really long time, and is totally shit but I love it, a couple of tasty synths that have made sure I haven’t been able to afford a holiday for a couple of years, an accordion, an old Hohner organ, anything I can get my hands on...

RA: I read online that Ambarchi was an influence, who else influenced your sound?

Cian: If I had to narrow it down, and I really hate to do so, I’d say Alog and Phonophani are big influences, they seem to apply an attitude that I really agree with… whatever’s available to them can be used in a song if it sounds good, and that’s an attitude that I wholeheartedly support. In fact, as a label, Rune Grammofon has been hugely influential … stuff like Deathprod, Spunk, Archetti/Wiget, Supersilent, have never been too far from my CD player over the past few years .

Patrick: We both worked in record stores for over 20 years combined, when you do that its hard not to be exposed to something good in literally every genre (although blues proves elusive for us both), there are pop songs I like right down to noise… In terms of ‘our’ ‘genre’ of music, I suppose Stars of the Lid was the first group I heard that was like a penny dropping. I’ve always loved drone since I was a kid (the sound of a fan humming in a room, the din of a busy street, an orchestra tuning up) but I never knew there was music that utilised it until I heard Stars of the Lid. It was actually then through the guidance of Vinny Dermody (The Jimmy Cake), who I worked with at the time that got me into the likes of Morton Feldman and some other, more obscure contemporary classical composers like La Monte Young. Sonic Youth were definitely influential too in the way they used noise as an instrument and not just an extension of a sound…

RA: Is there much of an experimental scene in Ireland as a whole?

Patrick: I think that, against the odds, there is little to no scene in Ireland. We have such a rich history of art in Ireland, from the Yeats brothers to Beckett to le Brocquy, it’s hard to see why Ireland doesn’t have more culturally diverse music scenes, and never really has for that matter. I think it comes down to how ingrained traditional Irish music is culturally. Unlike a lot of other countries, traditional music is soaked into the cultural framework of the island ... and as such I think it shapes the way a lot of Irish people view music as they get older. I honestly think Dublin produces more good bands per capita, however the last 4-5 years has seen an influx of nonsensical, ‘image over substance’, rich music. I honestly think half the ‘artists’ that picked up a synth in the last few years would probably be in a Cranberries type band had they been born a decade earlier. Saying that, there are some phenomenal bands that we produce in this country, but sadly they’ll rarely get the credit.