Gareth Quinn Redmond Over There In The Gallery

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Very pleased this month to bring you a short film that incorporates minimal ambient music, a favorite genre of mine, and tens of millions of euros worth of fine art. In fact, there's so much fine art in this video you might need to pause it a few times on repeated viewing, to truly digest this virtual tour of The National Gallery of Ireland (and surrounding area).

Last year it came to my attention via this clip on Instagram, that ambient musician Gareth Quin Redmond would regularily sneak in to the National Gallery of Arr with a few tiny synthesizers and create impromptu but very prohibited ambient synth jams. The courage that takes! I thought an ambient artist with that kind of conviction, is gonna go far. It's a struggle to be taken seriously in that musical world. SImilar to experimental music or jazz, it takes courage to persist in such a free flowing artform. It takes courage to play somewhere where playing is not welcome.

Simple to create. Ambient music is as easy as asking yourself "how do I feel today?" and depending on your emotional makeup at that very moment, and how close you are to it, the scale you pick, the tone you produce, the pattern random or fixed, winding or eractic, can come as quickly as the thought in response to the question, "eh... I feel grand like", or "YEs! HEllo Day!!" might be the sound. "Ehhh... I'm initrigued by the depth of the blue in that stained glass" Gareth might be thinking, as he sits motionless, trying not to be seen, just heard. Art examining his thoughts, as he examines it. I like to think of this kind of one man ambient flash mob approach to filling spaces as the primary and most desired way to create and perform ambient music! Airports come a close second to art gallaries. Large echoing places filled with sounds of bussling life, are generally a good venue, and opportunity to soundtrack everyone's day. Everyone who hears you, thinking in agreance "Yep, I feel the same way". Ambient music concert halls, where nobody listens but they feel the air, they sense the mood. The perfect audience for a genre of music that just wants to be air and nothing else. A reactionary realm within an audience, within the human brain, mostly reserved for smell.

I love that Gareth would do this, repeatedly. The security guards now know where he is when his sounds appear, yet as I observed when shooting this video, they take a luxurious amount of time before they notify him to stop. Gareth told me that once a security guard admitted to him in a polite and casual exchange as Garteh was being removed, that he spent over an hour trying to locate where the sound was coming from before noticing Gareth perched discreetly in a foyer that connects two multistory sections of the building. Because of this location being in the middle of the gallery, with windows letting in light to all of the main arts spaces, Gareth's ambient sounds could be heard whispering throughout the whole building. The security guard pointed out that this was the reason it took him two hours to locate Gar. Well, I'm entirely certain that on his failure to find where the sound was emanating from, the guard returned to his routine casually strolling around making eye contact with people, thinking "this music's kinda great", " what a great idea", before he eventually found Gareth, by accident.

Grá

Myles