Black Coral

Cian ‘Moose’ Megannety is a cornerstone, a man deeply woven into the Irish music scene as a whole, through his work with bands like Wolfbäit, Wild Rocket and more recently, Creepy Future and BB84, or with his world renowned guitar pedal company, Moose Electronics, who feature on the pedalboards boards as diverse as Fontaines DC, No Spill Blood and Somebody’s Child, as well as at the feet of international troublemakers like Idles, Year of No Light, The Cosmic Dead, Gnod and many, many more. Megannety’s latest solo endeavor, Black Coral, is a simmering drone and electronics focussed affair with an impressive new album, ‘Dark Coasts’ out through UK Label, Tesla Tapes.

Great name. Where did the moniker come from?

When I started off I just called it Moose Electronics, because there's sort of power electronics element to it, with all the noisy stuff. Over Covid, the pedals and the Moose Electronics brand took off a bit more, and it confused me so I figured it would confuse everybody else too. I was trying to come up with another name and went looking for oceanic type things, and came across black coral, which is a type of coral that exists without sunlight. I figured that suited the dark and droney world of the music.

I was reading that ‘Dark Coasts’ (which sounds immense) has been some years in the making, starting out as a lockdown project. How did you go about putting it together?

I wanted to teach myself how to record and mix properly. It started out as an exercise to learn how to do that kind of stuff. Playing with sounds, making deep drones, layers of bass, then it’s mostly about trying to divide up the frequency spectrum, the same as a band or an orchestra. You've got low end, midrange and high end, so you roughly fill those spaces. The drone fills out the bass. There's also some analog function generator sine waves in the bottom of that whole mix as well. I have some old test equipment so I just tuned some sine and square waves, and mixed it in underneath to really fatten it up, the whole thing has a substantial pressure-y weight to it.

And in the composition, is it a thing of improvisation over these drones?

I just listen and kind of go on what I feel it needs. Some of the drones were ten hours long, four hours long, and you just listen through them and pick out pieces. In theory it shouldn't, but if you leave two things long enough, drones or anything, they'll interact in different ways. Daniel Lanois talks about it somewhere I think.. He’ll have stuff running all night and then come back the next day. The two things have talked to each other enough that they've created new patterns. So yeah, trying to find stuff that fits in with the patterns and make something work and then just create like a story or a journey. So start, middle and end. Or like an introduction, the meat of the story, climax, and outro.

It seems very intentional. There is a narrative to it.

I think of it as a journey. The very densest parts, I try to keep it in a world of water, like the densest parts being deep underwater, and when it opens up, it’s like coming up for breath every so often, getting a glimpse of sunlight

Some of it you put a story on afterwards, some of it was intentional from the start. I've studied oceanography, and I have a big interest in the sea, so… even just looking at some of the geographical stuff, the physics and the math, and learning how waves work.

Waves are all oscillations. It's all frequencies. It's all the exact same, a sine wave or an ocean wave. In theory they are the same thing, even though in practice they’re completely different.

I have a very busy head so with all these things just bouncing around, whether they actually connect or not, and then just trying to make sense of that.

So on ‘Dark Coasts’ you handled all the production and everything yourself? Can you tell me about how you learned about all that?

I'm lucky that I'm mates with a lot of really good producers, like Rian and Spud [Murphy, ØXN, Percolator]. So I’d be picking up tips from people and talking to people about what they're doing. Seeing that kinda heavy weight stuff live as well. I’ve seen Sunn O))) a couple of times, I've seen Scorn and The Bug, Big Brave and they’ve all had an influence on how things should feel (and sound).  Also just playing in BB84 with George [Brennan, One Leg One Eye, Melodica Deathship] and Paddy [Shine, GNOD] and Natalia Beylis. Their processes and how they come towards stuff really opened up my world of electronic music in general and how to make stuff.

‘Dark Coasts’ is out now through Tesla Tapes, and available for streaming from their Bandcamp page at https://teslatapes.bandcamp.com