Rún

Shipping Around 22nd August

The Irish word Rún can mean secret, mystery, or love, or perhaps some elusive combination of the three, reflecting the many aspects of life that defy easy explanation. In wrestling with these, it can become necessary to commit oneself entirely, to jump in at the psychic deep end in search of the vibrations and feelings at hand. This is where the band Rún come in.

The debut album of Rún - the result of three powerful artists locking horns and bringing equally passionate and uncompromising approaches to bear – is no less than an extraordinary collective catharsis. Yet more evidence that true heaviness is about much more than a cranked amp. It’s an emotionally driven and richly atmospheric journey into the darkest recesses of states earthly and unearthly, from a spiritually intrepid outfit who alchemise experimental methods and improvisatory states to reach intimidating heights of sonic and psychic intensity.

Rún comprise firstly Tara Baoth Mooney – sometime Jim Henson voice artist, with a longstanding background in everything from folk and choral music to experimental film-making. Diarmuid MacDiarmada – Nurse With Wound co-conspirator and brother of Lankum’s Cormac, brings with him the experience of avant-garde collaborations with a plethora of artists stretching back over thirty years. Drummer, sound designer and engineer Rian Trench, meanwhile, has worked on everything from the psychedelic IDM of Solar Bears to auto-generative experiments to orchestral arrangements, and owns the studio – The Meadow on Ireland’s East Coast – in which the album was made.

The disparate artistic practices of the three members of the band collude in this context to create something no member could have foreseen. “Beyond the larger themes we explore, the work is often inspired by dreams, synchronicities, and other uncanny influences found in everyday life” reckons Diarmiud.

Besides this, an extremely diverse range of musical influences make their presence felt here, from William Basinski and Pauline Oliveros to Om, Coil and The Necks. “Suffice to say that there was a variety of sacred musics, acid-folk, cosmic jazz, stoner / sludge-metal, avant-garde composers and a hint of R&B being ground up and baked in with everything else in our wonky witches’ kitchen.” They say, “Things that possibly shouldn’t go together are juxtaposed to create something surprising and new.”

Improvisation is the primary method here in channelling spirits from this realm and others, hospitable or not. “When we get together to work, we often engineer particular atmospheres in order to bring ourselves to what we call the ‘deep’ place, this is the ‘finding’ phase of the process, where ideas come together with whatever stuff is in the ether”, the band relate.

A centrepiece of the album drawn from such is the potent 'Terror Moon', on which a thunderous percussive backdrop is matched in intensity by potent chants and mantric ululations from Tara as well a ferocious tumult of layered noise and fevered invective. “Terror Moon confronts us with the image of the unblinking eye of a dead horse, juxtaposed with oranges rotting on the branches of the groves in Jaffa after their Palestinian custodians were evicted by Israeli settlers” relate the band, “The song is a reflection on the inhuman treatment routinely inflicted on both human and non-human entities.”

‘Your Death My Body’ projects exorcising vocal meditations through a musical prism that touches on the lineage of spectral beat-driven atmospherics that connects Portishead and Tara Clerkin Trio. The strident and primal crie de coeur of ‘Strike It’ meanwhile, relates to the macabre and horrifying details of the Tuam babies controversy, which took place in the town where Tara went to school. “The song points to the sheer hypocrisy of a religious institution in such profound dereliction of its duty to the most weak and vulnerable of us.” Psychic succour is at hand at the end of the journey however, in the form of the album’s finale ‘Caionieadh’. Redolent of both the spiritual fortitude of Dead Can Dance and the blissful soundworld of Talk Talk, it functions to both leave the listener at the conclusion of a redemptive arc and to throw the unflinching darkness of the album into sharp relief. As the band state “The album is a kind of metaphysical journeying through suffering and grief eventually leading into a transfigurative ecstatic state or keening, a liberation through ego-death into oblivion.”

The stakes are high in the creative realm of Rún, with the record’s ritualistic approach leading it to the territory of the truly elemental and primal. Yet this is a record with the metaphysical firepower to cleanse the spirit even whilst it stares darkness full in the face. As the band reckon “At the most basic level, a ritual approach lifts one’s actions and one’s perception out of the mundane, finding a kind of sacredness in the ordinary stuff of life.”

As Ursula Le Guin once said – “In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.” – in the increasingly materialistic and inhospitable realm of 2025, there can be few better companions than Rún to embrace reality and confront this void.

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