Séamas O'Reilly: The Cork-made Irish music film which has raised my spirits like no other 

Clockwise from top-left: Rachel Lavelle; Niamh O'Regan; Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Kate Ellis & Caimin Gilmore; and Laura Quirke & Joshua Burnside in A City Under Quiet Lights Vol. 1

A large part of my week, I must at some point admit to myself, is given over to despair. 

One of the main ways I pay my rent is by writing about current events for a living. Worse, this job sits atop my pre-existing and terminal addiction to inhaling every horror that trickles across my newsfeed. 

Writing, at the best of times, requires a low hum of professional stress, since deadlines and assignments are little different from being stuck back in a horrifying school for adults, where you must learn a new and useless thing every few days and do homework on it every single day until you die. 

Throw in the fact that the news generally vacillates between being enraging and actively terrifying, and you have a perfect recipe for the sort of blackened, calloused heart most journalists sport by the time they’ve had their feet under a desk for a year or two.

As a result, sincerity is something I work hard to preserve. It’s difficult. If you spend all your time, and earn a good share of your income, cataloguing all that’s wrong with the world, it’s hard to savour the good and true wonders within it. 

My go-to response to the above-mentioned horrors is to tamp down my feelings so I never get so pummelled by things that I lose all hope entirely.

Unfortunately, this narrowing of emotional range sometimes stops me from celebrating the sweet stuff of life, the good things which all too often bounce off this protective shell.

As such, it is nice to have something good to share. Better still, that I am so driven to share this good thing that it has pushed away any desire to discuss the madness of this week’s Conservative Party conference or, say, the alarming recession of Greenland’s ice sheets. 

I received just such a balm this week, with the release of Myles O’Reilly’s new short film, A City Under Quiet Lights Vol I.

The video, posted for free and in full on YouTube, comprises six or seven performances by Irish musicians, filmed in O’Reilly’s trademark, painterly style.

It was recorded during the 2021 Quiet Lights festival in Cork, in a host of locations around the city, all filmed with unfussy elan.

It opens with Cavan’s Lisa O’Neill singing blindfolded in a room in the Crawford Art Gallery filled with antiquarian statues, before moving on to Belfast singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside and Carlow’s Laura Quirke performing in the intimacy of a dimly lit Coughlan’s pub, on Douglas St. 

Elsewhere, Galway’s Niamh Regan and Cork-based bassist Caimin Gilmore offer an achingly beautiful rendition of her song, ‘Love You Senseless’ at riverside, while Kerry’s Junior Brother tears his heart out in a church tower, singing ‘Lambs On The Green Hills’ under the Shandon Bells.

It should go without saying that the music is spectacular but, if it went without saying, I’d be out of a job, so allow me to say it anyway. 

These are transportingly sublime songs by just a few of Ireland’s current embarrassment of musical riches. 

They are not necessarily household names — although some are globe-trotting attractions in the world of folk and traditional music — but they represent a census of songwriting talent that would be the envy of any nation on Earth. 

Judging by the responses I’ve received from people overseas this week, they are. At the very least, A City Under Quiet Lights, and the decade-or-more O’Reilly has spent cataloguing Irish music not found elsewhere, might introduce you to new artists you’ll love, and support, for years after.

In short, if this was merely a catalogue of beautiful music, it would still be the best thing I’d seen in quite some time. 

But A City Under Quiet Lights is much more. Each performance is a beautifully shot little short film in its own right, capturing the intimacy of each musician’s voice, and the unfussy beauty of their surroundings. 

Each is placed in sequence with the rhythm and pace of a master storyteller, and filled with dozens of tiny little nuggets of grace that reward rewatching. 

There are constant moments of throwaway brilliance. Some are on the part of the director himself, thumbprints in the clay that reveal O’Reilly’s invisible hand; the artful shot choices throwing up a thousand slices of life from a city just awoken from its lockdown slumber, street art, buskers, swimming dogs and swirling gulls; exquisitely framed and lit interiors which somehow, and always, provide a perfect complement to the sounds; the euphoric scribbling of Kate Ellis’ cello and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s ten-string fiddle, which segues between their performance and the next with interstitial brio; or the soft, almost imperceptible, drone that leads you to the boardwalk and blends with Gilmore’s upright bass plucks and Regan’s plaintive guitar.

And then there are the wonders that seem entirely accidental. The sounds of dog walkers or laughing children intruding on, enhancing, the music as you listen. 

Small, unfussy adlibs caught in the mix, like motes of dust caught in a shaft of sunlight. 

These are of course, not accidental at all, but the kind of of serendipitous moments you earn when you take the care to create and curate soundscapes that hum with real life, away from the shiny floors, velvet drapes and deadened air of mainstream music coverage.

I’ve never met O’Reilly, nor — despite his fine surname — am I any form of blood relation. But I have followed, and exalted, his films in every avenue I could find since my earliest encounters with his work. 

I’ve occasionally done this with such vehemence, I’d imagine he has been mildly unnerved. If this be the case, I can live with it. 

The highest compliment I can pay his films is that they erode any fear I may still hold of appearing too sincere in praising things. 

They give me hope that some things can be purely, and entirely, good. That for all its faults and horrors, we still live in a world worth savouring.