We have featured IRTH on these pages previously but today I was fortunate enough to grab some time with the talented duo to discuss their latest release, challenges, technology and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
We’re from Salt Spring Island in BC, Canada. It’s a beautiful little island of dreamers and healers where the community (including children and elders) come together every thursday eve for “Dance Temple” – an event where everyone simply dances their feelings into expression, free of the social chit chat.
We create music that honors space, ease, beauty, melody, emotional/physical movement (ALL emotions welcome), and the inner wilderness of the human heart. All of our music grows out of the ancient BC forest that surrounds us.
We sometimes call it “ghost pop,” partly because it has a haunting quality, but also because the space has the potential to call forth the ‘ghosts’ within us that are calling for healing and transformation – the aspects of our deepest selves that have been repressed, shut down or walled off for some reason at an earlier point in our life.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to stay the course?
We were both blessed with attuned, musically inspired parents who gave us the tools and the environment to develop our natural inclination towards musical expression. The central drive at this point comes from a deep longing we both feel to bring ease and beauty into people’s lives. We see people suffering everywhere, stressed and locked into limiting beliefs of self-deficiency. As meditation instructors we love to practice meditation with whomever crosses our path, and the music helps to facilitate that sense of connection and appreciation for the unimaginable sacredness of our individual lives – something we can only experience when we are relaxed enough to drop into our senses and allow our awareness to expand beyond the dank, limiting cave of the thinking mind.
How is your new release different than previous ones? Did you set out to accomplish anything specific?
“Wild Love” is the first song we’ve released that we wrote completely together from the ground up. It’s also our first release under our new name, IRTH (a combination of our two last names).
We wrote “Wild Love” for a ‘wedding-like’ ceremony held for friends of ours, intended to mark and honor the weaving of their ancestral lines. The magic of the song is that, after we wrote it, we reflected that it felt and sounded like a mixture of Appalachian and Irish music, only to discover later that one of the two friends has an Appalachian background and the other Irish. When Marley and I create together we go into a kind of trance and really listen carefully to what wants to be born, so this magical coincidence was a welcome confirmation of our process and deepened, yet again, our total trust in this mysterious life web that flows in and around each of us.
Do you face challenges as an indie musician in a digital age? How has technology helped you (assuming it helps)?
The main challenge is that, because people listen to music primarily through streaming sites now, we no longer earn much income from recorded music (except when we’re on tour – physical albums still sell on tour). We don’t get too bogged down around this reality though. Change is always happening and, unless you can flow with it – especially as an artist – you will become stuck in the past. Technology has helped us immensely – from making it more affordable to make beautiful recordings to allowing us to reach a larger audience, create and offer videos, advertise live shows etc.
We want to bring beauty and spacious warmth into people’s lives, and technology helps us do that.
The way we both see it, technology has never been the problem. Loss of presence, ground and connection to the felt life of our bodies is the only problem humanity has. If we keep the ground and practice living in slow connection with our feeling life, technology becomes an amplifier for that sanity. And our planet needs sanity right now.
Where can we connect with you online and discover more music?
Anything else before we sign off?
Go slow and breathe. Thank you!
