A few years ago, Jack Colleran was the new kid on the block, in every sense of the term. Those who had heard the Newbridge teenager’s spine-tingling electronic music tracks were raving about his potential as a producer. He played festivals including Stradbally’s Electric Picnic and Austin’s SXSW in 2011 and 2012 respectively, and you assumed that the lad was good for take-off.
Right now, lanky Colleran is in a Dublin hotel bar talking about life and sounds. His debut album Luneworks arrives this week after a lengthy gestation period. So what took so long? While the album took two years from start to finish, there was also a couple of years hanging around waiting in the middle of it all.
“We’ve been waiting for the album to be done,” he says. “We’ve been setting up the label, working on stuff for the live shows. I’ve been only doing this for five years, so half of the time was spent waiting for stuff to happen. Two years is a lifetime to me because there’s been nothing else going on.”
The musical one
Colleran was the musical one in a family that was not musical at all. "Like, my mam would listen to Mary Black or Frances Black in the car, but that was as far as it went," he says.
As a child, though, he was clearly curious about music. “I played piano from an early age. I don’t know where I got the idea from. I don’t even know where I’d have seen a piano at that stage,” he says.
“Eventually after six months of me pestering her, my mam sent me to do lessons with this guy down the road. I bought a piano with my Communion money. It was an awful piano, but it’s still in the house.”
It was all classical stuff until his teenage years came along.
"I didn't play anything other than classical until I was 13 and started to delve into other stuff," he says. "The first CD I ever bought was the Milkshake single by Kelis, which I thought was the most amazing thing in the world.
“I remember seeing the sleeve in the shop and it’s this beautiful woman sitting on a milkshake. I was 12 or 13 at the time and I thought this was brilliant. It was such a weird first buy – a good first buy though.”
Into production
A few years on, Colleran decided to try to learn how to produce music. He downloaded the music-making software Ableton and went to work.
“I think I was just bored. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d no idea what I was doing. I don’t know if it was intuition or what. I’d downloaded sample packs and had ripped stuff off YouTube. It was a really messy approach to production, but I’d no one to answer to. It wasn’t a job. I wasn’t trying to impress. It was really pure. When I listen back now to where I was at the time, I find the quality of the productions to be so, so poor.”
Then the upload Colleran uploaded the tracks he had recorded to Soundcloud for his friends to hear. Others outside that circle, including blogger and fellow Newbridge native Nialler9, heard the music and word began to spread.
“I kind of wish I hadn’t been so open about what I was doing,” says Colleran, “but when you’re 18, you just want to share what you’re doing with your friends and that’s how people like Nialler got to hear me and started to write about me.”
Labels and managers began to get in touch and Colleran found it hard to concentrate on anything else, especially exams.
“Because I’d focused so much on writing and recording when I was supposed to be studying, the Leaving Cert fell apart,” he says. “My mam will kill me for saying that, but it did. She’s fine about it now.”
Colleran headed to Los Angeles after his exams and signed a deal with the SQE label. When that label folded, he and his manager Jimmy Fleming decided to do their own thing.
He started working on the album in Dublin, before moving to Los Angeles. “It didn’t feel right in Dublin. The energies were not right and I was in a weird headspace. So I made the decision to go to Los Angeles to put it together there.
“I stayed with Jimmy and slept on his floor for two months, which was horrible but necessary. I’d have slept on a floor anywhere to get away from Dublin at the time and LA happened to be the place.
“I still work mostly from the laptop. I’ll use external synths and effects, but I’ll use them by sampling them. I sample a lot of the piano at home.
“When I went to LA, I couldn’t bring any of that gear with me, so I had to sample them and save them to the laptop.”
Back in Ireland When Colleran brought the tracks back to Ireland, he moved to The Meadow studio in Co Wickow to work with Rian Trench from Solar Bears.
“When I started working with Rian, we used different techniques to bring the tracks outside the laptop, and that was interesting for me because it shone a new light on the music for me. Rian is insanely good and Mandy [Parnell] who mastered the album is amazing, so I was very lucky to work with them.”
At last, then, the album is ready to go and Colleran is keen to get on with things.
“I really don’t want to spend as much time ever again working on something. It was too long. But doing all that gave me a chance to mature and grow up. I’m still 22 and I don’t think I should have been releasing an album when I was 20 years old.
“Looking back now at how it has all happened, I didn’t know what was going on at all, not a clue,” he says.
“I’m really excited now about where I am and getting the album finished, but there’s loads I still don’t know. I’ve no formal training, but I like that. I like leaving it to experimentation to work things out.”
- Luneworks is out now on Because/OYAE. Mmoths plays at District 8 on Francis St in Dublin on March 19th
