ØXN: Pulling folk music into the future and ready for Cork Jazz Weekend

Your writer was among those who bore witness to the incendiary gig that gave rise to Dublin/Waterford four-piece ØXN — pronounced ‘oxen’ — a live collaboration between singer and songwriter Katie Kim, and trad singer/musician Radie Peat at the chapel in Griffith College Cork for the 2019 instalment of Quiet Lights festival, that saw them go about reworkings of ballads in the Irish, English and American folk traditions that bore their sonic hallmarks equally.

When the pandemic hit and the two musicians were living near each other in Dublin, the collaborations continued, and the band expanded their roster to include mutual production collaborator John “Spud” Murphy, and drummer Eleanor Myler, his bandmate in psych-rock outfit Percolator, across jamming and a pandemic-era live-streamed performance.

That same sonic territory has been blown into a veritable panorama on the band’s debut album CYRM (pronounced ‘sy-rum’), released tomorrow on the recently-reactivated Claddagh Records — Child ballads stretched into Ennio Morricone-type soundscapes, sparse, primal drumming grounding the latter stretches of ‘Cruel Mother’, doomy drones lending heft to lingering, spacious harmonies on ‘Love Henry’, and a nod to the present, in their interpretation of Galway songwriter Maija Sofia’s ‘The Wife of Michael Cleary’.

Kim discusses how their repertoire of tunes came together as their initial collaboration progressed, and the songs that made their way to the album.

“I brought some songs to it, so did Radie... I hadn’t really worked with traditional tunes like this before. This is the love of Radie’s life, y’know, and she’s really talented at finding these versions, particularly versions that she likes, bringing them forward, rearranging them, creating a whole entire different arrangement herself.

“I hadn’t really had a lot of experience with that. Also, y’know, my experience of growing up with traditional music was sessions in a pub, in the background, or listening to commercial Irish music on the radio or something like that, whereas meeting up with Radie and getting an education on it was really, really interesting.

“‘Love Henry’ actually comes from a Judy Henske version; she was more of a blues singer. There are so many different versions of ‘Love Henry’, or ‘Henry Lee’, but her version is really the only version that we could find where the woman is the murderer in the song. For once, it’s not a man killing a woman, whereas a lot of traditional music or murder ballads [feature that nature of violence], and we thought that was really interesting.

“With ‘Cruel Mother’, there’s this horrible tale about this woman who does these things to her children, but we still look at her like she’s the oppressed woman, and the reason she does these things is because she’s driven to it by mental illness, oppression. There’s a guy called Andy the Door Bum, if you look him up, he’s an amazing artist that Lankum are really good friends with and I’ve gotten to know over the years, and it’s actually his version, his arrangement that Radie heard, and we used that.”

After that pandemic-era performance, the band made the best of the circumstances to go into Hellfire Studios in Dublin together, and inhabit it in a quieter time for the world — the idea of haunting an empty studio to bring these ideas and interpretations to life must have been quite the experience, considering the oftentimes quite heavy nature of the material they were wrangling with throughout.

“I think we just went a bit mad with them, you know what I mean? (laughs) We just said, ‘let’s throw everything in the kitchen sink at it, and then start to kind-of strip away’... We have played these songs, and I still love those arrangements, when they were just me and Radie, because they’re very, very pared back and they’re very minimal and they’re really beautiful, but there’s a whole different feeling of playing the songs, when you have a full drum kit behind you. You have Spud, and it’s his niche, finding those really beautiful sonics, that sub, and that kind of guttural stuff that he’s really good at doing with bass and synthesisers, manipulation of sound and all that kind of stuff. Sampling, looping...

“With the four of us together... it was lockdown, Lankum weren’t touring, [the rest of us] had to stop working. Hellfire Studios was free so we said, ‘let’s just go and just do it’. It was empty and Spud was given the keys. We just went in there, and y’know... used crisp packets and rubber gloves as percussion, weird instruments and things, and just got wine and food, tea and biscuits and stayed there for over a week, trying to kind of get everything down. It’s pretty weird to look back on videos that we have at that time — a very different time.”

With ‘CYRM’ in the can, the band has set about whipping together a live set that takes their common repertoire back into the gigging environment, facilitating that expanded sonic palate and conveying that same sense of scale and experimentation that’s evident throughout ‘CYRM’ and its running time.

The Everyman will host the band’s Leeside live debut in earnest as part of an expansive and eclectic Jazz Weekend programme, and the venue’s history and presence isn’t lost on Kim going into it.

“We’re excited for it. We’re kind-of anticipating how it’s going to go, but anytime we get back in the room together, it always seems to just click into place. We were desperate to get to Cork, as well, and we were trying to do it on our own, and then just as luck would have it, the Jazz Festival asked if we’d want to be part of it, and it was just a godsend.

“I think I would have been in the Everyman once, and that was when I lived in Cork when I was seventeen, so I haven’t been there in a long time, and I it just being such a beautiful place, and we’re absolutely delighted for it to be the venue.

“Excited, and terrified, and nervous, to play for the people of Cork.”

ØXN’s debut Cork gig under the moniker takes place at 10.15pm (Thursday, October 26) at the Everyman, MacCurtain Street. Tickets €25 are available from everymancork.com, or the venue box office.

ØXN’s debut album ‘CYRM’ releases on October 27 on CD, 12” vinyl and digital services via Claddagh Records/Universal.