Moot Is a leftist artist collective and record label from Kilkenny Ireland
Record Label :moottapeslabel.bandcamp.comBefore becoming one of Ireland’s most clued-in cassette labels, Moot Tapes began life as a leftist art and music collective. Co-founded by artist Stephen Morton and electronic producer Peter Lawlor, aka Replete, Moot’s initial efforts included creating artwork, planning DIY shows, and organizing a small festival in their home city of Kilkenny. By 2018, their scope had grown to include a tape label as a result of Lawlor’s laudable decision to no longer “release music into the ether.” Amen.
Released in 2018, the beatific ambient drone of Lifting—a split between Lawlor and Neil Quigley—swiftly formalized the desire to release music in a format that would be conducive to a warm, rounded sound. In the five years since, that warmth has spanned a handful of short-run, island-wide releases that have comfortably zig-zagged between noise, abstract sound collages, breakneck techno, and beyond.
Guiding all of this is a fierce collaborative spirit typified by the label’s ongoing series, Signs of Life. The series isn’t just a strong point of entry into Moot, but into Ireland’s script-flipping DIY scene in general. Currently five installments deep, Signs of Life has hosted everyone from sound artist Muireann Levis and Howlbux (Elaine Howley and Irene Buckley) to SSMMÜTT and Phil Christie of experimental jazz magi The Bonk. With more to come in the months ahead, it signposts a scene that often feels like it can barely be contained.
Hand-drawn by Morton and often wonderfully labyrinthine, the album art lends Moot an identity that feels grounded in—but not limited by—homespun ideals. In an independent scene that’s community-driven to the nth degree, Moot sits alongside the likes of Dublin Digital Radio and Open Ear festival, marrying outsider energy with insider integrity.
Eoin Murray , March 21st, 2022 09:52
Eoin Murray catches up with Kilkenny’s Moot Tapes label, and spotlights psychedelic and experimental gems from across the island
A quick glance at the Bandcamp page for Kilkenny’s Moot Tapes label is enough to suck you into its strange sonic universe. Nightmarish figures and other-worldly characters adorn the covers of its 13 releases to date, alongside gnarly abstract splashes and sketches of people hugging, wrestling, hallucinating visions of God or staring bewildered over a laptop screen. Its logo depicts two creepy, cat-like creatures hanging upside down, wrapped in what could be an embrace or a fight – together, they almost take the shape of a human heart.
Moot dates back to around 2012, originating as a leftist art and music blog. Morton, who creates all the label’s visuals, and his friend Peter Lawlor, aka the electronic music producer and DJ Replete, started hosting gigs, club nights and even a small festival under the name, and held down a monthly DJ residency at Dublin venue, The Bernard Shaw, for several years until it shut. The idea to start a label, which Morton was admittedly quite sceptical about, came as a way for Lawlor to release his more experimental and ambient leaning work. Its debut release, a split cassette with Kilkenny composer Neil Quigley laid the groundwork, with the latter’s track, ‘Death Vapour’, setting the tone for much of the label’s catalogue: disjointed thuds, warm electronic swells and concrète clicks swish about as a robotic voices repeat the track’s title.
Since, the label has championed the works of “friends and friends of friends”. From Static.’s slamming rave cuts and Claire O’Brien’s chillingly intimate songwriting to SSMMÜTT’s scrambled motorik psych and Claire Guerin and Eamon Ivri’s bristling found sound experiments, the label has developed a distinctive identity, even with the sheer amount of variety at play.
In February, Moot released its debut vinyl EP, courtesy of Howlbux (The Altered Hours’ Elaine Howley and Irene Buckley) and Muireann Levis. The first release in the label’s Signs Of Life series, these two tracks occupy a sublime space: a wavering, alien voice repeats a quiet parable over a foggy synth melody in ‘Nightfall/Over’; Levis’ vocals hover above sparse, environmental ambience in ‘Elsewhere’.
The EP’s artwork is the label’s most striking to date, and embodies the “signs of life” the series is hoping to capture: “I was thinking about axolotl and sea creatures and all these new life forms marooning up onto a beach,” says Morton. “There is a broken down sand castle that signifies the fall of empire, of real life castles and the queen and all that shite. Then there’s the final remnants of humans, cans of tenants and amber leaf. Then, buried waist high, is a kind of broken but beautiful person surviving, resurrecting. Then there is the cut off head of a landlord/capitalist in the corner and everything is happy and full of life.”
Signs Of Life: Part 2 was released on 4 March, and features two stunning tracks from Neil Quigley and Irene Buckley, taking in lush electronic beats, cavernous woodwind motifs and a jazz-inflected instrumental jam a lá Tortoise or Do Make Say Think. The plan is to release five parts of the series as a single vinyl volume in due course, but for now, there’s a killer catalogue to rummage through.
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