Viola da Gamba player Liam Byrne mostly spends his time playing either very old or very new music. He began his career playing with many of Europe’s leading baroque ensembles. The last 15 years he’s spent collaborating with artists beyond the Baroque, including Damon Albarn, electronic musician Valgeir Sigurdsson, trad fiddler Cleek Schrey, or guesting with new music ensembles like Crash Ensemble (IRL), B.O.X. (BE), and stargaze (DE).
Numerous composers have written for Liam, including Nico Muhly, Donnacha Dennehy, David Lang, Edmund Finnis, Errollyn Wallen, et al. He’s created sound installations for the Victoria & Albert Museum and Southbank Centre. Liam is a member of the Icelandic record label Bedroom Community, with which he’s released several recordings including his debut solo album Concrete.
3 FACTS
1: The first successful shipment of frozen lamb and beef from Australia to England was in 1879 on a three-masted iron steamer.
2: On Fraggle Rock, the reason the Fraggles eat the Doozers’ constructions is because they’re built out of crystallised radish powder, and the Fraggles are crazy about radishes.
3: I wish I had a border collie.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Making music gives me the chance to step outside of time. The thing that really motivates me as a performer is finding those little millisecond opportunities in music where I can bend a rhythm without breaking it, playing with my and the listener’s perception of time and pulse and motion, chasing that feeling of existing on multiple temporal planes at once. It’s about a subtle balancing of the relationships between my body, my 350 year-old instrument, and the acoustics of a space, but this musical time-bending also happens on a kind of macro level in that I play so much 17th-century repertoire in very contemporary contexts.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
My Irish grandparents in Co. Kildare had an ancient clonky piano with brass candle holders swinging on the front, and I spent enough time banging on it as a kid that my parents decided to get me some lessons. I then started to play the double bass at 11, which got me into a music college, but it wasn’t until I found the Viola da Gamba at 18 that I really started to discover my voice.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill: Live in Seattle
Karl-Ernst Schröder and Crawford Young: Amours Amours Amours
Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark
Philip Glass: Songs from Liquid Days
Colin Stetson: New History Warfare vol. 3
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Spätis, an open sense of time, waterways, and Ehrlichkeit.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
I both love and absolutely hate walking across Warschauer Brücke. There’s something about the fact that you think it’s a river but it’s just train tracks that I adore, but it’s also the worst. Generally speaking it’s vistas that get me: the Straße des 17. Juni (takes me back to standing on top of the Siegessäule as a 19yo first seeing the city), the cute bits of Karl-Marx-Allee, some of the Spree views.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
If this question is about how I’d occupy my time, then I’d probably sail around the world with a little dog. If it’s about how I’d make money, then probably some kind of carpentry, maybe even boat-making until I’d earned enough for my first answer to be an option.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
Cormac Begley’s 2017 self-titled album of unaccompanied concertina music. I saw him play last year and have been obsessed ever since. There’s so much energy and detail in his sound and it’s so exciting to listen to every time. I am always drawn to solo acoustic instrumental performances, especially when someone can say so much with a simple melody.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’ve always been fascinated by Okkyung Lee, and would be super nervous to play with her, but I think it would be nervousness like right before you jump off a high rock into a cold sea. You’re so scared but love it as soon as you’re in it.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
The best show I’ve seen in a long time was My Brightest Diamond at Casa Saga in Antwerp last November. Shara Nova is an absolute master onstage, and she kept the audience on the edge of its seat and made me weep three times. As a performer, it’s too hard to say, but last December’s performances of “A Masque for the Multiverse” at Radialsystem were definitely up there among the absolute dream projects.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Despite my process largely centering around playing a baroque instrument, technology has been super important to me, especially in the last decade. I spend a lot of time thinking about microphones in amplified and recorded sound, and learning to listen through the lens of this technology has given me fresh perspectives on the kinds of sounds I make with my old instrument, and unlocked colours and dynamics that I don’t think I would have discovered otherwise. It’s been a kind of lateral thinking aesthetic shift that balances out historical information and makes me question everything.
11. Please tell us what can we expect at “A Masque for the Multiverse” by laborgras & CONTINUUM?
This project is unlike anything I’ve ever done before. It’s inspired by the Masque, a ball-like entertainment-party-spectacle thing from the court of James I at the beginning of the 17th century. Our multiverse party combines bits of old music, absolutely gorgeous contemporary dance, a little poetry, and fantastic new songs by Shara Nova inspired by the existential questions posed by the historical texts. The audience moves freely around the space throughout the evening, guided by changes in lighting and the movements of the performers. It’s not participatory, but the audience is very actively looking and listening and becomes a central part of the event. It’s a collaboration between ensemble continuum, who are renowned for their imaginative rearrangements of baroque music that are both deeply grounded in historical practice but also ingenious and unfettered, with the dance company laborgras, who are currently celebrating their 25-year anniversary in Berlin with a retrospective of their favourite works, including this!
