WORDS Liam Maher
First Second Dublin is a label that has been working its way steadily towards international recognition from its beginnings in the electronic underground. With many of its artists such as Lumigraph and Boya being released on Eamon Harkin’s New York based label Mister Saturday Night, it is obvious that the current Irish talent is finally getting its much deserved recognition.
“It’s usually friends I work with, I know everyone through somebody. It’s always been that way, I prefer it.” So says Daire Carolan, the head of the label. Having started the project back in 2011 with his friend Aidan Hanratty (head of the Truants blog), the label has released some of the best underground Irish artists of the past few years and kickstarted the career of many producers. The label came about after Carolan was working on the promotional side of things, but was not a fan musically of many of the nights he was promoting, which tended towards electro. “I was more into techno and bass,” he admits, “and there were lots of local people making that kind of music and getting no recognition.” Initially, there were only three or four releases planned for the label but things soon spiralled and now the label is nearly twenty releases deep.
One of the problems that is really affecting the Irish scene at the minute, Carolan points out, is the archaic licensing laws. Here, clubs have to close at half past two during the week and three o’clock at the weekends. With such a setup, local promoters, not to mention local djs and producers do not get a chance to adequately represent their talents as well as the local scene itself. Carolan suggests, that with longer nights, “the promoters would be able to make more money and we would be able to showcase more local Irish talent and gain more international recognition for local acts.”
Enter Omid. His first release Pipes/Dowachu has been making waves in the house and techno worlds and has been supported by the likes of Bambounou, Anthony Naples and Krystal Klear, who have all included it in many of their recent sets. Such support for a first release bodes well for Omid, who began producing when he was in his fourth year of secondary school. This initial starting point soon stopped as he got into hip hop before he re-entered the production world at the end of fifth year, after he started clubbing and going to the Twisted Pepper with his friends such as Boya (a fellow First Second affiliate).
Omid usually “starts off with percussion,” before “attempting to put a bass line over the top of it and then fit some cool samples around it”. Such a process sounds simple but upon listening to Omid’s productions you’ll find that the results are far more complex than he makes them sound. For example, Pipes starts off with a heavy drum pattern fading in before a laid back synth line enters, giving the track its rolling offbeat groove. From here a vocal sample filtered through various effects moves in and over the top of the beat. Dowachu works differently, with various elements building on top of the percussion pattern that starts the track and reaches a crescendo two and a half minutes in when it descends into techno madness.
Interestingly, these first two tracks that Omid has released were written a while ago. Having gotten around a creative aporia now, his main focus is on production and moving on to bigger things. With a debut release such as this, it is hard to think of any other trajectory for him.
