When he isn't penning articles for The Irish Times, writer Patrick Freyne is busy publishing acclaimed books.
He follows his popular essay collection OK, Let's Do Your Stupid Idea with a debut novel, Experts In A Dying Field, a wryly amusing musical tale inspired by a years spent playing in cult Irish bands like El Diablo and National Prayer Breakfast - read an extract here, and listen to Patrick in conversation with Brendan O'Connor below...
We asked Patrick for his choice cultural picks...
FILM
I absolutely loved Weapons, directed and written Zach Cregger. Horror is where you find all the interesting indie directors go nowadays, because there are few other places to experiment. So Weapons jumps horrifically from subplot to subplot and character to character in a way that's like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia or Richard Linklater’s Slacker. That multi-perspective structure ultimately services a weird folk horror story masquerading as a thriller. It’s amazingly well-structured with a brilliant cast including Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Benedict Wong and veteran character actress Amy Madigan, who was given an Oscar for her trouble.
MUSIC
There isn’t a genre alive I don’t feel could be improved by a banjo or some other twanging instrument (grime/classical music/poetry). So I love the explosion of excellent traditional/folk acts like Lisa O’Neil, The Mary Wallopers, Ye Vagabonds, Lankum, Poor Creature and Landless. I am very looking forward to the forthcoming solo record from Lankum's Radie Peat.
BOOKS
For years people said to me: "You need to read Keith Ridgway" and I said "yeah, yeah, you’re not the boss of me. You can’t tell me what to do." Then I read his newly published novel Dooneen and it was brilliant. A possibly unreliable narrator travels through a portal from London to his hometown of Dublin - an eerie place filled with both old-fashioned hotel porters and new-fangled walkways - and finds himself caught up in a socialist insurrection. It’s a rich, slightly hallucinogenic book and I read in one sitting.
THEATRE
At the weekend I went to Smock Alley to see four excellent actors workshopping Osakaland, a new play by the playwright Gabriel Graves and the short story and non-fiction writer Ronan Kelly. Set in a cheap and cheerful Japanese themed spa, it features three customers and an employee of "Osakaland" grappling with key moments in their lives while, simultaneously, dealing with saunas, jacuzzis, and meditation sessions. Even in its workshopped form it’s really well structured with hilarious screwball dialogue. I would like to see it in The Abbey.
TV
Sterlin Harjo co-created the excellent Reservation Dogs, about teenagers in a reservation in Oklahoma. His more recent show, The Lowdown (on Disney Plus), features Ethan Hawke as an idealistic middle aged bookshop owner, journalist and sleuth trying to get to the bottom of both a murder and historic injustices in his hometown of Tulsa Oklahoma. It’s a rare thing: a witty, non-cynical noir detective story that’s ultimately about inequality and community. It’s funny and gripping and often surprisingly moving.
GIG
At the Roise Rua festival on the island of Arranmore in Donegal around twenty of us went to a singing workshop run by pioneering folk genius Andy Irvine which was, in fact, him singing and playing through old folk songs and original compositions while telling us the story behind them. It was intimate and personal. It would have only been improved by having fewer people. He’s on tour again soon but I assume there’ll be lots of people.
ART
My novel, Experts in a Dying Field, features Mainie Jellett’s I Have Trodden the Winepress Alone – a beautiful, messianic painting of a figure striding from the sun – which I first saw at an exhibition of her work at the excellent exhibition showcasing Jellett and Evie Hone at the National Gallery last year.
(Pic: National Gallery of Ireland Collection)
I also loved the recent exhibition of William Blake’s work, especially all the lesser known (at least to me) artists who were influenced by his trippy mystical religiosity. I particularly liked Francis Danby’s very apocalyptic The Deluge from 1940 which featured people and at least one lion nudely trying to cling to rocky summits and bare branches as God’s watery wrath sweeps them to their doom. Noah’s Ark floats smugly in the distance.
RADIO
Brían Mac Gloinn from Ye Vagabonds’ new Lyric FM radio show, Songs to a Stranger, focuses on contemporary folk and traditional music and is pretty special. It’s on every Sunday at 6pm.
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TECH
Get way from me with your "ChatGPTs" and your "Claudes". I recently purchased a shruti-box, a small wooden box with a bellows that produces a drone for singing along to. There’s a choice of eight tones, a scale basically. It’s an Indian instrument, derived from the harmonium, that’s recently made its way into western folk music. I bought it in a new age music shop. It makes every song sound better. You can also, if you like, ask it questions and it will answer them (in any combination of eight notes).
THE NEXT BIG THING...
I love the paintings of Manar Al Shouha, who came to Ireland as a refugee in 2022 Ireland’s asylum limbo. She now has a studio and a career as an artist in Dublin. I caught up with her for the Irish Times last year. Her work is emotional yet disciplined, complex yet simple. It’s beautiful. It reminds me a little of Mainie Jellett.
Experts In A Dying Field is published by Penguin
