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It is the extraordinary, fortuitous nature of this harmony of seeming opposites which gives what's happening in this Artane studio tonight its special strength. What it offers is enough to be getting on with, the product of a labour of love involving another kind of trinity - a collaborative one, between Enya, Nicky and their other partner-in-crime, Roma Ryan. It's light on that other vital element, celebration, but no matter. It is music which encompasses the Holy trinity of creative endeavour: intellect, emotion and imagination.
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This music aspires towards a deeper impact, exploring moods, textures and memories in a way that draws in the subconscious and invites us to paint our own pictures. There is nothing here about the trivial concerns of conventional pop: no boy meets girl, no flimsy professions of undying love, no waking up the morning after and realising that it wasn't all just a bad dream. From 'Watermark' through '' (My Journey Ends Here) to 'On Your Shore' spirits are evoked which I hadn't been in touch with for some time, and not in this way for longer. It's heading on for midnight already and suffused almost in darkness - a sense which is enhanced by the mercurial flickering of console lights - and enveloped in a pervasive surrounding quiet, the music takes on a profundity I hadn't anticipated. Nicky Ryan is at the controls, talking ten to the dozen as he cues up tracks, as if a dam has broken, and the flood of words he's been holding back for the best part of two years can finally flow free. Tonight, however, is listen-back time and an opportunity to hear Watermark, the new album by Enya, in optimum circumstances. You could live here for months on end, burrowing away at songwriting and recording, and no one would know. Open this and you're inside a perfectly self-contained and attractively isolated recording studio. To the left you enter a passageway and walk undercover - down the garden - towards a small door. But things begin to get somewhat strange when you realise that the building doesn't end here. You're led in through an ordinary three up two down hall, into a simple suburban kitchen.
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Out in the undistinguished suburb of Artane, you knock on a door like ten thousand other doors stretching back towards Fairview or onwards to Raheny. Trying to define just what its is, is a little more elusive, Mr. And that if they're lucky the chords will reverberate and the waves will rise up and they too will feel part of the whole, reaching backwards and forwards across generations, beyond the past and into the future.Īnd you will wake up knowing that something special is happening here, and no mistake. And you will know that journeys must always end and that there will be a here where they do and a when - and that someone else in the future will try to unlock the doors of their own past and say Speak Memory. Tonight you will go to bed and dream of ebb and flow sea waves dancing against imaginary rocks, hear water hiss and sigh on anonymous beaches and feel again the power of the deep and its magnetic appeal. Later there is just the windswept streets, the odd broken reveller staggering home, and a sad piano refrain playing on the spirit. And all around, hearts beat, hearts beat. at the exit from a bar another is about to end. Behind the wheel of one car a love story is beginning. A delicate keyboard sounds, a bank of voices reverbed up to 20, a haunting melody asserts itself and percussion crashes - and all the minor dramas suddenly come into focus. This comes as a revelation, this feeling of connectedness, flowing from the music on the stereo.
#Enya enya album cover photo orinoco flow movie
Figures emerge from the battered urban landscape, picked out as if by a movie camera, their presence suddenly dignified with a significance that normally escapes us. It's night-time and the streets of Dublin don't look quite the same.
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