Life Cycling

"Nick Cave said music should be a vehicle” says Phil Kieran, “a thing you can put yourself inside, to be taken on a journey; to let your own imagination create the connection between life experience and the sounds you hear". Kieran has been one of Ireland’s best producers for almost two decades, and when he spoke with Maeve about an album he’d been working on, he sounded a note of caution that, maybe, well, it wasn’t the sort of thing Maeve would like. If this was a shameless attempt at reverse psychology, it worked. Interest was piqued, the conversation continued, and the result was an enchanting, hypnotic album unlike anything heard from Phil, or anyone, before. That album was Life Cycling and it was quickly agreed that this would be the perfect record to serve as Maeve’s first full-length artist release. In a world where everything is speeding up, Life Cycling slows things down, a painterly mosaic of the artist’s life, a vehicle into which he has placed his own experiences. Drawing in references as broad as Kraftwerk, Popol Vuh, even Bach, It’s a paean to the organic and human, drawn through the hum and whirl of machines and it taps a greater personal resonance for Kieran himself. “It’s not easy to work out who you are deep down” he says, “never mind what that might sound like. For the last few years, I have truly been making music that is just me. I have collected all these experiences along the way and find I have finally got to a point I can describe a feeling I have inside; to look for that vibration that really resonates with me, to create it. Life Cycling is a vehicle, and place you can put yourself”.