One Leg One Eye
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Christmas cheer is replaced by a cold howl of dread as Ian Lynch, of Lankum, and the electronic producer George Brennan bring the One Leg One Eye project to life in a purgatorial haze of dry ice and red backlighting. The 60-minute performance at Project Arts Centre is a wonderful ghost-train ride into an otherworld powered by droning electronica, warped uilleann pipes and spirals of unfiltered noise. If there is a place in the universe farthest from the 12 Pubs of Christmas or someone murdering Fairytale of New York at the office party, then here it is.
As one of the driving forces behind the Mercury- and Choice-nominated “mutant folk” band credited with helping revitalise the Irish traditional scene, Lynch has made his reputation by tapping into the ancient forces rippling through Ireland’s rich musical heritage. With One Leg One Eye the Dublin artist delves deeper still into the black loam of myth and mystery layered underneath modern Ireland.
Where Lankum are trad with a twist, One Leg One Eye is a horror movie in musical form. The music is full of things going bump in the night and menacing shapes moving under the bog water. With all of that happening, the first of two sold-out shows at Project is quite an experience. It is both a sensory onslaught and a respite from the Christmas madness. The feeling is of stepping through a portal into a scary Hibernian Narnia.
Half-obscured by the dim stage lights, Lynch and Brennan hunch over their instruments, a sort of Pet Shop Boys of folk-horror electronica. Yet there is beauty to go with the shade as Lynch applies his ragged Liffeyside burr to Bold and Undaunted Youth. It is his take on the 16th-century ballad The Newry Highwayman, which here suggests Ronnie Drew playing the lead in The Wicker Man.
The mood grows even more intense with a proggy reinterpretation of I’d Rather Be Tending My Sheep. An ode to the joys of animal husbandry, the tune was supposedly discovered by the British musical folklorist Ruth Tongue in Somerset in the early 20th century – though many now believe she secretly composed it herself and then passed it off as a traditional dirge.
Lynch began the One Leg One Eye project when he moved back to his parents’ home in Baldoyle, in north Dublin, at the start of the pandemic. Amid the stillness of early lockdown he took to exploring the wilderness on the edge of the city. Roving the landscapes of his childhood, he made field recordings in haunted locations such as a now-shuttered factory in Howth where his father had worked. Encouraged by friends, he shaped the material into the 2022 album …And Take the Black Worm with Me, a mash-up of Lovecraftian cosmic terror and homespun folk.
The bucolic squall of I’d Rather Be Tending My Sheep dissolves into a recording of WB Yeats’s poem The Second Coming that is cradled in a low black metal hum. Famously evoking the “centre” that “cannot hold”, the poem expresses the foreboding that hung heavy in the air through the mid-20th century and is surely just as relevant today in the portrait it paints of a world in chaos. But it isn’t all gloom and doom metal. When the music stops, and the duo smile, the sense is of resurfacing after a dive somewhere deep, dark and magical. Christmas isn’t cancelled after all – simply refashioned into something better attuned to the bleak Celtic midwinter.
One Leg One Eye are at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, again tonight
