Roger Doyle is described here as Ireland’s ‘Godfather of electronic music’, his magnum opus being the gargantuan award-winning ‘Babel’, where each piece of the five+ hour work corresponded, like the stories of Borges, to an imagined space within that tower city. ‘Cool Steel Army’ is a more modest, less forbidding proposition, electronics only featuring on the title track, the remainder employing acoustic instrumentation to explore basic, minimalist themes.
For ‘Cool Steel Army’, Doyle punctuates pleasantly melodic piano passages with pockets of white noise, then floods things, schizophrenically, with a gruff, overdriven drum track. ‘Paavo’s Engagement’s allows Doyle to further stretch his piano skills, excessively over 17 minutes, although the manner in which he allows familiar, Glass-like arpeggios to skip and slip off their axis is rewarding. ‘Adolf Gebler, Clarinettist’s sets Carlo Gebler’s dislocation narrative, of the titular musician’s trip to Ireland, to a similarly pithy chamber score, with mournful clarinet lines echoing Gebler’s lonesome travels. This is an odd, homespun collection of music, from pseudo-opera to harsh breaks, and one can only hazard a guess at where Doyle might next take us.
Joshua Meggitt
