Carlow electronicist Jimmy Behan has crafted a first album of astonishing heart and soul, writes Jim Carroll.

IF ALL Carlow mods made music as beautiful as Jimmy Behan's, the world would be a better place. But few have taken the same route as Behan and experienced the musical epiphanies which make his début album such a wistful, wonderful tale.

You could call the album, Days Are What We Live In, electronica, but that seems an inadequate description for the warm, emotional heart and soul stirring in the midst of such tracks as Hanover, Summer on the Wall and Deeper Than Heaven. Behan's handiwork is assured, dramatic and alluring throughout, turning sketches and drafts into low-key masterpieces.

In person, Behan is as quiet and unruffled as his music would suggest. A prolific contributor to various Irish electronic compilations over the last few years, Behan has developed his music with every passing release and track. For once, potential has been realised and those who heard talent on his début EP or split-single for Road-Relish Records will find much to cheer about on the album.

But Behan himself seems eager to move on quickly from here, treating Days Are What We Live In as a full stop at the end of a very long page.

"I see it as finishing off something I've been trying to do for a while so that I can move onto other things," he says. "As I was coming towards the end of recording it, I was coming up with new ideas all the time and had notions about going off in different angles, but I managed to resist them and just kept it simple and got it done. Now, it feels like I've finished a chapter."

As a young mod in Carlow, Behan always wanted to make music but wasn't so sure where to start. "It's a thriving town, but it's been completely bypassed when it comes to music," he says. "I was immersed in the whole mod thing and there were a few northern soul nights, but nothing more than that."

A move to Dublin to study photography was an opportunity to put that right. Behan found himself living in a house with five guitarists, so purchasing a guitar seemed like the right thing to do. A subsequent downshifting to a bedsit with paper-thin walls scuppered that idea and the guitar began gathering dust.

Then, like many other Dubliners at that time, Behan discovered the dancefloor. "Going out to clubs completely changed how I listened to music. For two years, I just couldn't listen to guitar music. I thought it was over, I thought it was going nowhere. Instead, I overdosed on club music."

The next natural step was to grow his own. "It dawned on me that this was music I could do myself. I didn't have to rely on studios or other people or even instruments. I went away and did a sound engineering course to learn how a studio works and how to operate it."

By the time he emerged from that learning process, Behan knew the world didn't need any more bad house music. "I had grown tired of that house beat and was doing stuff with slower tempos and downbeat breaks, less dancefloor-orientated music."

He heard St Etienne's Nothing Can Stop Us Now and instantly recognised elements from his northern soul days, albeit done in a totally different way. "It was a big revelation to see that you could make electronic music by using acoustic sounds, and that sent me off in another completely different direction."

Besides making and releasing tracks, Behan played and collaborated with both Nina Hynes and Alphastates, working the stage out of his system. He admits he's a reluctant live performer and says he feels "forced" into it. "I don't make music which is made to be performed - the computer does the performing. It's an old show-business tradition that you play live to promote the product, but a lot of electronic music is so studio-based that it should be allowed to stay there.

"When you sit down to start a new track, you have a vague idea where you want to go with it so you start reaching for samples and sounds and think if you use X, you'll get to Y and start pushing buttons. But it doesn't always turn out in the same way as I thought it would sound in my head."

There's also a danger of relying too much on all the technology at his disposal. "You get that with a lot of electronica, where you can hear where they're using the latest software or plug-in that's available. I try to avoid that, even though it's hard sometimes when it's right in front of you."

One way around this, Behan realised, is to change how he works. That's why he has begun the MA course in Music and Media Technology at Trinity College. "I really wanted to do the course because I was interested in finding new ways of working. I felt I was stuck in a rut, sitting down in front of the sequencer every day and banging out track after track, just churning out tracks. Finding new ways of working will hopefully spark off new ideas and directions."

Behan has no masterplan about where he's going or where he wants to take his music. He talks about the album's release as "a way to reel in one of the international electronic music labels" and get them interested in him and his work. If that happens, he'll happily go with the flow.

"I've vague notions about what I would like, such as being able to survive from making records," he says. "Being hugely successful commercially does not really interest me. The electronica scene is very global, but it's also very small because you tend to hear about the good stuff.

"Good records do get noticed and pick up attention. I'm hoping I will be lucky."

Days Are What We Live In is out now on Elusive Records