Description
Having sold his instruments to fund a nomadic 1970s lifestyle, eccentric Irish experimentalist Michael O’Shea was forced to create his own handmade answer to the sitars and zelochords he’d become accustomed to playing on his travels around the globe. Using an old door, 17 strings, chopsticks and combining them with phasers, echo units and amplification, the new device was to become his signature sound, mixing Irish folk influences with Asian and North African sounds in a mesmerising and soulful new way that brought him to the attention of the leading improvisers of his day – Alice Coltrane, Ravi Shankar, Don Cherry and more. A logical follow up to AllChival’s recent reissue of Stano’s debut LP, Michael O’Shea’s self titled LP was originally released on Wire’s Dome Imprint in 1982.
The background to the album is as interesting and inspiring as the artist who created it – born in Northern Ireland but raised in the Republic, O’Shea was keen to travel and escape the troubles of his home. Wandering throughout Europe and the Middle East, O’Shea found himself living and working as a relief aid in Bangladesh in the mid Seventies where he learned to play sitar while recovering from a bout of hepatitis. A later period spent busking in France accompanied on zelochord by Algerian musician Kris Hosylan Harp led to O’Shea’s idea of combining both instruments as a homebuilt instrument – Mo Chara [Irish for “My Friend”]. A combination of dulcimer, zelochord and sitar, O Shea would play it with a pair of chopsticks, striking the strings softly using Irish folk rhythms mixed with the rich, nostalgic sounds of of the many Asian artists he’d encountered on his travels. It was a pan cultural sound standing at an unusual crossroads of folk, traditional, rock, progressive, jazz, electronic and post-punk worlds without hesitation. The first side features the fifteen minute masterpiece “No Journeys End” with the B side featuring more input from Wire in processing the Mo Chara sound. After an aborted LP with The The’s Matt Johnson the following year, O’Shea quietly disappeared from the formal recording world and his brief but unique contribution to the music world came to a sad end in 1991 when O’Shea was struck by a post van and died a few days later in hospital in London. This repress on All City’s AllChival imprint has been remastered and reissued with the approval of both Dome and his surviving siblings.
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