Nyahh Records
NYAHH RECORDS
Words: Adhamh O’Caoimh
Nyahh Records, the label responsible for some of my favourite albums in recent memory, has had a dizzyingly prolific few years. Whether unearthing the people who become internationally acclaimed performers like Mohammad Syfkhan, championing rare homegrown talent like Ultan O’ Brien or compiling collections of esoterica old and new, pulled from strange recesses of our cultural history,and more recent wonders from distant lands, like Cork. The tireless efforts of label head and founder Willie Stewart have seen the Nyahh garner some well deserved notoriety on the international stage, and 2026 has been no different.
We caught up with the man behind the label to discuss some of the wonderful work Nyahh has in store for us in the year to come, why it began, and where the name came from.
It’s easy to forget that you only started with Nyahh in 2021, and it's been a busy couple of years. Obviously, a label is a massive undertaking, moreso with such an unconventional roster. How did you get started? What was the thinking behind the founding?
I was running a thing called Hypnagogic Tapes for a while, mostly home dub cassettes and CDRs. It was doing okay, but it didn't really have much focus. I didn't really have a philosophy or a major idea behind it. It started feeling really random to me, while at the same time i felt like certain things in ireland weren't being represented, weren't being put professionally on vinyl, or proper cds and things like that, so I just thought, okay, I'm going to scrap Hypnagogic Tapes and move on to a new label where I'm going to focus on vinyl, and just kind of slightly tighten the parameters a little bit, but also expand them, if that makes sense.
What was the thinking behind the name?
The word Nyahh came up for me just to sort of describe the soul, or spirit of something.It was a word that's also a sound, and it would encompass everything I kind of wanted to focus on.You either have the Nyahh or you don't. Like if somebody was singing Sean Nós or something, and people might be like, “oh, they've got the Nyahh”, like they're really touching. They're in touch with some kind of spiritual realm that lets them sing that way.
That does seem to be a theme among the roster, that otherworldly connection. Can you tell me about the year to come, and what you’re putting out?
Natalia Beylis will have a new album out. She composed and was conducting a piece called ‘Around Here the Birds Plant the Trees’, an ensemble piece that she wrote a score for, and then let the musicians put their own parts together. She pieced it all together and then conducted it live. That's myself on percussion, Eimear Reidy on cello, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh and Ultan O'Brien on viola, with Tola Custy on violin. We played a couple of shows before the end of last year and then at the end of the little tour we went into a studio and recorded it. It's a very long form piece, 50 something minutes or so.
I have heard very good things about that piece, I have looked forward to hearing it.
There was a field recordist named Seán Corcoran, from Drogheda, who spent a lot of the 70s and 80s recording traditional music all over the country. He did a bunch of recordings up in Fermanagh, that I think came out on cassette in the 80s. He has passed, unfortunately, but his daughter, Rosa,organizes the Seán Corcoran Series festival every year, and she has all these recordings from her father that she would like to put back into the world. so i'm going to release some of those on vinyl. I've also put out a record for Josephine Foster, named ‘Adormidera’.Definitely ,the highlights so far for this year have been E the Artist, Mohammad and Josephine.
Word on the street is there’s a new Mohammad Syfkhan album in the works.
There is! Mohammad told me he’d been working on some new songs, and wanted to do an album of all original material. and that he wanted to record an album that sounds ‘bigger’ than the first one. I recruited Naseem Alatrash, a Syrian composer and cellist based in Boston, to transcribe all of Mohammad's new material for strings and saxophone, and we have Eimear Reidy, Larissa O'Grady and Cathal Roche playing on it, with some live percussion from Ihab Mahna on it too. It was a really fun process, and has come out sounding incredible with all the strings. Very big and very lush. We hope to have it out in October this year. The album will be titled 'I love You Ireland', which I think is a very powerful title.
How did you get involved with Josephine Foster?
We had put Josephine on at one of our Hunter's Moon festivals. I can't exactly remember when that was, but she was playing with Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh. Josephine came back to Ireland to play a big long break, Ailbhe called and said “you know, we need somewhere to stay tonight. Any chance we could call over to you?” And we said absolutely! So they both stayed at the house. And then Josephine had an extended stay. She actually stayed at one of our cabins for an artist residency for a week. We got to chatting and she said she wanted to use a new record label for her next release and that's where we're at now!
When I was doing a little reading on the background of Nyaah, it struck me how the metal and punk spirit, especially the D.I.Y. ethos behind those scenes has continued on and permeated our modern experimental and traditional scene here.
It's funny, it sounds so normalising, you saying experimental and trad in the same sentence at this point. It's one of the same now, really. In a way it is, even though a lot of trad people would actually shudder to think that someone would say that. I never intended to align myself with that scene. It's just sort of happened. Everything just sort of happened at the same time.
There’s been people making weird stuff in Ireland forever, as I try to demonstrate in some of the compilations. When I was growing up in Dublin, trad wasn't cool. It was something that Gaeilgeoir families were into, you know what I mean? Obviously in other parts of the country it's always been huge ,and thriving but you know it's just become so prevalent. It was all drum and bass and techno when I was a teenager, so you know live music gigs in the mid 90s were very small, so when you had Fugazi or Shellac or whoever coming through, then you get a full house, but most club nights were all about electronic music.
Now with the likes of Féile Na Gréine and Open Ear, you see electronic music on the same bill as a punk band, or a noise act with an indie band followed by more techno. We’ve certainly come a long way culturally.
And yet the ethos behind it is the same.
I mean, we probably know a lot of lifers. They're still going to gigs, they're still buying current music, they're still creating music or art, at least they're still very much part of, I suppose, the scene. I think just once you have that moment, you know, when you're a kid and you go to your first couple gigs and you buy your first fanzines and you hear about this really obscure music and it just suits you, you know, you just become part of that. It's all going back to that classic punk ethos of what it was when it first started. A lot of people would tell you that punk's been dead since ‘79 or whatever, but I think punk as an industry machine ended a long time ago. Punk is just this wonderful, beautiful underground scene that's constantly evolving. That's not dead. I still listen to a lot of punk music. I don't really go to so many punk gigs because I don't live near that these days. I got more involved then into the experimental world. And that's funny too. The crossover. The people in that scene, a lot of them have strong political views, or a lot of them are still vegetarian or vegan like myself. And even the way some punks grow out of it,, or some are vegan for a summer, or they just move onI… in the experimental, in the underground world, the noise world, or whatever, those people are often really dedicated. There's a bit more integrity in it for me than in some of the punk scenes, But overall, the DIY underground world, it's all part of that still for me. So, yeah, I just think, you know, I wouldn't even know what else to do at this point.