Gareth Quinn Redmond and Francis Harris come from different musical backgrounds: Gareth is known for his ambient compositions, while Francis has a background in electronic music and the club scene. Quinn Redmond has released six albums since 2019, with a focus on the Japanese environmental music movement. Harris has twenty years of DJing experience, and his albums Leland and Minutes of Sleep are especially notable for their versatility and expressiveness.
Their paths crossed in 2019, when Harris came across Quinn Redmond’s debut album, Laistigh Den Ghleo, and they soon began talking about working together. That first took the form of Quinn Redmond playing on Harris’s album Thresholds. On Eyes Bright and Low, out October 16 on INNI, the two bring their different approaches together, with the album taking shape over around four years of email correspondence. They traded ideas back and forth using a mix of analog and digital synthesizers and piano.
In the thick of the writing, Harris suggested adding a vocalist, and Quinn Redmond reached out to the Irish artist Rachael Lavelle, who sings and wrote lyrics on four tracks: “Swans,” “Flutter,” the title track, and “However Dimly.” Polish multi-instrumentalist Albert Karch recorded drums and percussion in the final stage of recording, then mixed the album himself. The result blends acoustic and electronic instrumentation with analog and digital processing, and leans towards the more melancholic side of electronic music. Even the cover follows the analog side of that process: Alex Chumak made it from processed fragments of 8mm film and set the type by hand, letter by letter.
I spoke with Gareth and Francis about how their backgrounds shaped the collaboration, Gareth’s interest in the Japanese concept of Kankyo Ongaku, and how they approached making an album that leaves plenty of room for silence and reflection.
The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
Carl Dexter: So what did you hear in each other’s music? Because at first listen, they seem so drastically different.
Gareth Quinn Redmond: A friend of mine, David McKeown, saw that Francis had shared my first record on Instagram. And I actually had never heard of Francis’s music, and just by virtue of that, reaching out to him, we just started talking. And it happened very naturally over time. I recorded some stuff for his album Thresholds, some violin and harmonium.
Then slowly but surely, I just wrote a piece and sent it to him. We decided to try writing something together. And I don’t think it was necessarily that we were drawn to each other’s music. I think we just really enjoyed chatting. Obviously, there was mutual respect. And of course, Francis’s music is amazing, and very different to my own approach. It was a mix of contrasts and intrigue, and then just getting on as friends.
Carl: I was reading about your relationship with Kankyo Ongaku; can you speak more about that?
Gareth: It was an ambient movement in Japan in the late ’70s and ’80s. It roughly translates to environmental music, and a composer named Satoshi Ashikawa spearheaded it. The composers were concerned with tone and quality and focused on getting as much meaning as possible out of a single sound. And I found that really resonated with me.
I started writing within that conceptual framework. I think as well, there’s a lot of ambient music out there right now that lacks intention, and I think that the kind of concepts that are kind of associated with that movement in Japan—their ambient music—I think it’s a good framework to work in while composing ambient music if you want to be as minimal but as intentional as possible.
Carl: I’ve noticed some ambient music drones too much just for the sake of having some kind of sound.
Gareth: Yeah, and there’s a real concern for space in ambient music in Japan that correlates really with their traditional music and this concept of ma. It’s kind of the idea is that silence can be as powerful as sound. And by using those two elements and giving them equal priority, it can give both a kind of power. You see it in a multitude of ways in their culture; even in their films, they use a lot of silence in scenes. And then when the music hits them, it’s so much more powerful.
Francis Harris: Gareth’s music is fascinating, because it’s this cross between those traditions in Japanese environmental music, and then clearly, roots in indigenous Irish folk music and folklore traditions.
Carl: And if I understand correctly, you guys have been collaborating on this upcoming record for three or four years?
Gareth: Maybe even longer. It kind of blurs a little bit. Looking back, there was a six- to nine-month period when we wrote most of the album quite quickly. We tried ideas back and forth intensely, and then we had time; there were periods when we weren’t working on it. But that initial burst of creativity was where it all really took shape.
Francis: I am the kind of person who works in spurts. My approach to music is always based on something non-musical. I might be thinking about a certain concept, reading a book, or exploring something intellectually, and the musical composition comes almost at the end. The inspiration has been building for a very long time. And I’m able to write and compose very quickly, in a very short window. So the actual writing of the music ends up being on the spot, very improvisational, like, find the hook immediately thing.
Carl: So at what point in that process did you guys bring in Rachael Lavelle, and what did she bring to this album that instrumentation alone couldn’t bring?
Gareth: After that initial nine-month period, Francis mentioned maybe getting a singer on board, and I know Rachael; she’s based in Dublin, too. She had just finished her own album. So I just sent her some of the tracks, and she recorded and wrote lyrics. It adds another layer to the album, because all the singles are instrumental. So I love the idea of someone kind of like having this idea of what the record is, and then when they finally get to listen to it, it’ll be like a whole other kind of realm and depth to it.
Carl: Francis, have you found that your approach to your own music has changed since you’ve worked with Gareth?
Francis: I mean, Gareth definitely challenges me musically, because he’s a much more accomplished musician. I play a lot of instruments, but not very well. But I have melodies in my head; I have ideas.
I think my strength is finding and sculpting sounds that embody a concept or idea. So working with Gareth was incredible, because the musical pieces he sent back were more complex in some ways than what I could do as a live musician. So he challenged me a lot to think about my own compositions.
Gareth: What I found inspiring working with Francis was his patience. As I’ve matured as a writer and collaborated with people like Francis, I’ve learned to be more patient with what I’m doing. So that was a huge kind of test for me to be more patient, because then the payoff is that time is actually such an important part of the creative process.
Francis would send stuff over, and I’d just be fucking mind-boggled at how he’d even created that sound. I’m kind of curious about his gear; he uses a Waldorf Q, and I’ve watched videos of people explaining that synth, but I haven’t heard anything like what Francis created with it.
Carl: I feel contrast is an underlying theme between you two, but you make it work, and another contrast I noticed was the balance between acoustic and electronic sounds on the album. Did you find yourselves gravitating toward one or the other?
Francis: A lot of the time I sample a live instrument, or sample a lot of acoustic stuff, or I record something, resample it, and create a synthesizer patch from that sample. So it felt kind of natural that we would meld these two things. I think it’s more obvious [on this record], because, again, Gareth’s an incredible live musician. What’s interesting about Gareth’s approach, and why I gravitate so much to it, is that there are real choices made. And this goes back to Japanese environmental music: one note that has a real choice behind it—that you’ve used this note, and there’s intention. That has a lot more power than a bunch of complicated things happening.
So I think that’s where I think our strengths come together: as a live musician, he has a very specific approach that I think sticks to that minimalistic, conceptual take on music, and my own interests in that, which are almost entirely philosophical. Music has always expressed concepts and political desires for me. It’s just the result of these things that I’m exploring.
Gareth: A lot of the titles were actually chosen by Francis, and I think it’s really worth noting how powerful that was. I’d send an idea across, and Francis would take it to heart and send it back with his sounds and intention. But he’d always send it back with a title, and that, in turn, would hugely inspire what I would do. So it wasn’t just a musical conversation; we were sharing so much more than that.
Carl: Is there a particular interesting story behind any of the titles on this upcoming album for either one of you?
Gareth: I’d have to actually look back and think about what I was reading at the time. When I’m working on a full conceptual album on my own, the titles generally come together into one particular story. This is a collaborative album, so it’s a little different. I have to look back at my notes. I take extensive notes when I’m doing these things. But inevitably, it’s pulled from literature or philosophy, I would say.
Francis reads so much, and he’d always be posting photos of his books. Actually, there was a book that I had been meaning to read for years, The Tuning of the World, R. Murray Schafer. And so I read that book while we were working on the album, and there’s a great quote in the book: “however dimly silence sounds.” And that was one of the inspirations for the last track on the album.
Francis: Okay. There you go. I didn’t even know that. You learn something new about each other every day.
Carl: Was there ever any time when you had disagreements or different thoughts about where a track should go?
Francis: Gareth got to enjoy the process of any project that I work on where I start to hate myself and the music. We went through that. He went through the Francis self-loathing: like, not wanting to talk about the record or push it forward for probably a good three, four months, which is kind of part of my process.
I’m deeply suspicious of artists who are in love with themselves. I don’t relate to that at all. I have an adversarial relationship with my own art, mostly because concepts are always questions; they’re not answers. And our life, our consciousness, our life force is a question, and it’s an open-ended question, so I’m interested in posing the right question.
Sometimes when something is reaching the end of a process where it’s, quote-unquote, finished, I become anxious about that, because it’s as if I’m leaving and walking away from the question that I was asking, and it’s kind of hard to just leave it there and just abandon it. I think there’s like a quote from, I think it’s John Lennon, who said that the songs finish when you abandon them, or you walk away from them.
Gareth was incredibly patient with me about that, and we also argued about what the project name was going to be, and I’m glad we settled on Francis and Gareth.
Gareth: It has a Fripp and Eno vibe, and I think the music definitely nods to that collaboration. The artwork nods to that as well; oddly, I don’t think we did that intentionally. But it definitely has Fripp and Eno as inspiration. And some of those records are the most influential records in my own life.
Carl: I got Tangerine Dream, Cluster, or Ash Ra Tempel vibes too.
Francis: That’s funny, because when we were doing album inspiration art, we sent several of those albums you just mentioned to the artists as inspiration, which is weird. You know, I was absolutely fascinated by that sort of new-age, conceptual music of that time; it was a peak period for this genre. Those records from that period are a real turning point in how we think about music and composition.
Gareth: The album artwork took almost as long as the music because there was such an intention behind the music. And we were so clear about what we wanted to do. Finding a visual representation for that was like, so fucking crucial.
Francis: I think it’s important. And we did argue a little bit about the artwork.
Gareth: We argued loads about the artwork. I was like, we got something I was happy with; let’s do it, and Francis was like, hold the fucking phone, and we had a debate about it. And we spoke about it at length, and we gave it time. And he was right because when we finally got that front cover, we both said that’s exactly what we were seeking. Alex Chumak made the artwork, and it was a physical process, too. He was shooting lights through film and capturing that, and it was like we were very clear about what we wanted. We wanted the artwork to have a focus to it and an analog approach.
Carl: Do you guys envision yourselves collaborating again in the future for another album, perhaps?
Gareth: I’ve been thinking a lot about it. Francis and I have both gone through two or three months of losing people that we hold close to our hearts, so I think there might be a meaning behind that on a grander scale, maybe us coming together to go through our grief processes together. I haven’t spoken to Francis about this at all, but I’ve been thinking about it. We’ve both lost people and our pets, so I think it could help to go through those things together.
Francis: Yeah, the timing of the announcement of the record was not very ideal for either one of us. For the release of every single, we had been going through something really horrible. It was a difficult summer.
Carl: I’m very sorry to hear about the recent struggles, and I would imagine that music is kind of an outlet.
Francis: Yeah, it’s been one of the main things for me. My first solo record was a record for my father, and my second record, the day that came out, my mother passed away. That album, Minutes of Sleep, is about those weeks I spent with my mother. Minutes of Sleep is in reference to the fact that I never slept during that period when she was dying. So my first two records focused on an intense period in my life, and it changed my music. It changed my musical approach and led me to a place where this album, and all my solo compositions, are very different from my club music, even though my club music is also somewhat melancholic compared to typical club music.
Carl: I can sense that there’s depth to the music beyond the surface, if that makes sense. I don’t know how to explain it. I listened to the album twice today, and I feel like there’s something else behind it.
Francis: I think we’re both pretty emotional people. I always say nostalgia is the tool of the state. Melancholy is a tool of liberation, you know, like involving yourself in melancholy and understanding that the world is too much is a form of resistance, and that’s how I embrace it as a concept in music. Some societies outlawed minor chord progressions because they force contemplation, and that idea of contemplation runs counter to what the state wants.
So I think keeping people happy with happy chord progressions and things like that is the opposite of living in a time where capitalism is sped up. Everything in our lives is so fast that we don’t have a moment to actually self-contemplate. So producing and writing and involving yourself in the art of melancholy, I think, is a form of resistance, especially in this day and age.
Gareth: I remember when I first heard Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Postcards. It has a soft sadness that isn’t necessarily bitter, but it invited real reflection, and I was obsessed with figuring out how that was even done. I never seek to do that intensely, but it resonated with me so much that it’s become a core tenet of my creative process: trying to capture that sense.
Francis: Yeah, I guess to deny that everything breaks down and everything changes is to deny a communion with nature, animals, and with the planet. So to deny melancholy is to deny life. That’s my approach to music: exploring these themes and trying to form a greater connection with the planet and with nature in general. It’s wonderful.
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