An 424

Imagine an amalgam of traditional Irish folk, post-rock, jazz and the disruptive spirit of Dada, stir provocatively with nine musicians on guitar, harp, trumpet, flute, fiddle, sax, clarinet and a double-drum rhythm section, and then set them all loose in a house in Connemara for a day and press ‘record’. An 242 is the result, a spectral ecstatic, psychogeographic record of the 424 bus route from Galway to An Cheathrú Rua, 14 stops later. It’s a 47-minute bus ride, considerably shorter than the immersive, enveloping tapestries of sound on An 242 (which was mixed by John ‘Spud’ Murphy, producer of Lankum and many others). The wider context is the South Connemara Gaeltacht, where Irish/Gaeilge is the main language, and the bus’ Chiron-like ferrying between there and Anglophone Ireland at the other end of the line in Galway. This is an expanded edition of the album, first released in 2023, and it’s packed with contrasting, idiosyncratic tracks, some of them passing the ten-minute mark like it was an empty bus stop. The short ‘Teach tuí Bhearna’ sounds like ghost noises from the Radiophonic workshop circa 1973 for a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who, while ‘Cé Mo Dhuine Siúl Sa Hi-Vis’ heads out on the back of Peadar-Tom Mercier’s liminal guitar. Other tracks have a Penguin Cafe feel, but with an acid folk chorus line, plenty of echo and many murky musical depths.