In Conversation with Rory Sweeney: On New Album Old Earth, Stone Tape Theory, Internet Culture, and Leaving Spotify

What’s your name, where are you from, where are you based, and what do you do?

I’m Rory Sweeney. I'm from Dublin, and I'm based in Dublin. I make electronic music. Sometimes I write and produce for other people like different rappers and singers but mostly I make electronic music for myself.

Can you describe the concept behind your new album Old Earth for someone who is not familiar with your music?

The album is electronica, which is a term that people don’t really use in music anymore. But I think it’s a nice term. People used to describe Massive Attack and Moby’s music back in the 90s as electronica. Really Old Earth is a chaotic album that makes all these really weird and different sounds. It's centred around time and memory on the internet and how it’s kind of disappearing. There are also a lot of allusions to Irish folklore and the Irish other-world. Plus, there are so many collaborations on it. It's basically just completely fried.

I read that Old Earth is heavily inspired by “Stone Tape Theory”. Can you explain what that term means to our readers?

Yeah sure. “Stone Tape Theory” is a belief that ghosts and hauntings aren’t evil spirits but simply just recordings of events onto the land. It posits that rocks are magnetic tape and they can record information the same way. The term comes from this amazing British horror film from the 70s called The Stone Tape. I’m also really inspired by writers like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds who explore hauntology. Even in my lifetime, I’ve seen so much of Ireland turn into this same kind of non-place where you can’t place where things really are. Obviously, Ireland is also this really mystical and weird place. I guess it's being aware of the coexistence between Ireland being other-worldly but also being the centre of faceless accelerated tech capitalism.

Is “Stone Tape Theory” a notion you’ve always wanted to translate into your music?

No. I watched it when I was 15 and it did make a big mark on me but I can’t really say it was in my head. I think my musical process is often something I can’t intellectualize until the songs are made after a long time. It's only then that I can see why I was making certain decisions. 

Sometimes I think it’s the wrong way to go about making art when people have the concept first and then make the music. But yeah, the film and Mark Fisher’s writing definitely informed a lot of my choices.

I read online that when the land records these intense emotions we receive them more as passive observers, rather than active. Do you feel like you’re a passive observer when it comes to the acceleration of technology or capitalism?

I think we all actively participate in it, especially me. I hate accelerationism. What’s funny is that even though I think it's gross I feel like I have to participate in it. Just absolute brain rot, internet garbage, like all the fucking time. At the same time, you kind of have to keep up with it or get left behind in a way. It’s something that does play on my mind and I feel a bit guilty about it.

The reality is people don’t question the implications of the internet. For example, big companies like Palantir that are actively and illegally spying on all of us. It makes me feel like we’re slowly but surely walking into something really weird and that everybody is sort of ok with it.

I think that inner conflict is felt throughout the album specifically in songs like “Ether_live2024 (ft. EMBY)”, that incorporates tense and confused overlapping dialogue.

Yeah. I think it is something I made a really conscious effort to do. I copied one of my idols who came up with this term called “compression”. It's basically compressing as much cultural information into a tiny bit of time. When you hear certain sounds, you have associations and there are psychoacoustic things that are going on too.

I like to play with a lot and really fuck with people’s sense of time. On "Mideval Times (ft. Curtisy & Ahmed, With Love.)” It's like a harpsichord [from medieval music] with really shitty R&B drums from the 80s. The boys are rapping about smoking blunts and driving cars and stuff. It's fun to mix those things with different time periods. The interlude bits are loads of really fried Irish people being fed through all these effects at once.

The album cover of Old Earth perfectly elicits an eerie, otherworldly, and abstract bodily reaction. Is there any place in Ireland besides the location for the photoshoot that you think embodies Old Earth?

Firstly, I think a lot of our thinking behind the cover photo was trying to evoke the Irish other world but also create this weird mixture of time periods. We wanted it to look like surveillance also. It’s hard to put my finger on a place in Ireland that does the same thing.

I remember going through Ardnacrusha hydroelectric plant [Co.Clare] in a boat before and that was a really fucking freaky experience. I spent loads of my childhood in North Sligo around the Sliabh Liag mountains and the Gleniff Horseshoe. Those are all super dramatic and it's always pissing rain there.

I remember driving through there, listening to “As Old As Time Itself (ft. RÓIS)” and just thinking about this real Nihilistic violence when they were formed. They were created through volcanoes, earthquakes and formed way before life ever existed on earth. They’re just so dramatic and strange looking. But I would say the album is more focused around the Irish internet more than anything else.

You use a lot of textured and fragmented sounds but I noticed there’s also mundane sounds throughout the album, like the creaking chair in Entrance Places (ft. Saoirse Millar, RÓIS & Rísteard ÓhAodha)” or the glass sounds in “Bird Drum”. Are you always listening or searching for new sounds in your day to day?

I think there have been times when I have done that but that's a real schizo vibe so I dont anymore. I think it's usually just a process. With “Entrance Places” it started with rainforest and chime recordings. I didn’t know it was going to turn into a big ballad.

It was the same with “Bird Drum”. I wanted to see how far I could take it. It literally started as a recording on my laptop. That’s when I make the best music when I don’t have a plan and I’m not thinking too much about the end result.

What was the fastest song to make on Old Earth?

Honestly, I was working on all of them for a really long time. “Morning Song (ft. Rísteard ÓhAodha)”, That song was like a 30 minute jam that Richie and I cut it down to like 8 or 9 minutes. The song is more or less pretty similar to how it was when I wrote it. Everything else had loads of post production done to it.

The beat that the boys rap on in "Mideval Times” and the bones of that song was probably made in like 4 minutes. I spent the least amount of time on “Bird Drum”. I probably did about 4 drafts of it while every other song I did about 50 drafts of.

Old Earth does a really good job at playing around with chronological inconsistencies like in "Mideval Times”. What was one of your favourite futuristic or electronic sound bites that highlights this contrast?

I think the nice thing about “Mideval Times” is that both the melodies and the boys' lyrics ride a knife edge of being outrageously silly and being pretty vulnerable. There are certain things that Kareem and Gav say that are actually quite sad but then they’re also like “I just smoked a blunt with Homer”.

“Bird Drum” is pretty cool because it's like a club song but it's pretty much impossible to DJ and it has no discernible rhythm so that’s kind of fun and playful.

I really like the first bit on the EMBY tune where he’s just rapping over these real plonky kind of computer noises. That felt like breaking some new ground. 

On “In The Deep” the drums on it are live but they’ve been turned into a synthesiser through using effects the wrong way. That drum break is really famous from the 90s so It was fun to fuck with it and change its context.

In the past, you’ve expressed missing your earlier works because they were so raw and unclean in a sense. Was there any song you had to revisit on the album to add some imperfection?

Yeah, through your naivety you’re creating really interesting music. I think there are loads of those newer Danish singers like Astrid Sonne who messed around with really naive production. I think it’s pretty cool. When you’re starting out you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re not trying to fit in or listening to stupid scam artists tell you these arbitrary rules for music or genre. You’re free from all that.  

More or less every song on the album I added like atonal noise and pretty tough sounds to listen to in the process of finishing it. It’s definitely something I made a conscious effort to do. Music that works really well has a human touch. Even like really weird computer electronic music. I left so many mistakes in the album because I think it’s more interesting.

The closing track has loads and loads of mistakes in there. There’s quite a bit of things that are out of time with each other. I like exploring these intense, emotional, or conceptual ideas on the album paired with sillier and more playful sounds. I think it kind of makes it funny.

Was your decision to break from Spotify finalised during the making of Old Earth and was it something that you grappled with as a music artist?

No. Not at all. For years I’ve been flirting with the idea anyway. Spotify is awful. From day one, it was run by a load of failed marketing finance bros, who realised the easiest way to make money was to rip off people who have no self-esteem. That was me for ages. I just had no self-esteem.

I think a lot of artists view themselves as fallen popstars rather than exploited workers. There’s pretty much no other industry in the world where you never get paid for anything but people make a fuck load of money off of you. I guess it's a metaphor for most of capitalism, people viewing themselves as fallen millionaires etc.

The main reason was when Daniel Ek [owner of Spotify] started pouring all his money into an AI military company and Zionist arms companies. I just couldn’t sit with myself anymore. Whatever about self-esteem, I can’t sit with myself knowing my money is being used to kill people with AI.

Where can you stream the album?

Literally anywhere else. Apple Music, Bandcamp or even TIDAL. Honesty TIDAL sounds the best and pays the best. The vinyl for Old Earth costs 30 euro. If you have no money though just illegally stream it. I’d much rather people download it off like Soulseek or a different piracy website, because at least if you make that effort you will listen to the album in full.

Did you plan on releasing the album the same day as the Irish Presidential election?

Oh my god don’t even get me started on that. We announced the album and within one week the presidential election was announced. Hillary Woods and Eoin Monk, who would have similar fan bases to me, also announced albums for the same weekend. Also, Bricknasty has stuff coming out. Then they announced Cork Jazz on the same day.

So, since I’ve announced the album, I’ve had six massive things announced all for the same time with bigger budgets than me. I was a bit upset about it at first but over the last few days I’ve been feeling really positive about everything. I think I’ll be grand.

Who are you voting for?

I’m voting for Jim Gavin. [we both break into laughter].

Can you tell us about your mini Irish tour coming up for Old Earth?

Yeah so, I’m doing an actual big tour as well next March. It will be in Ireland and bits of Europe. Places like Utrecht, Paris, and Edinburgh. Those shows are going to be full AV shows with loads of lights and crazy 3D visuals. All of it is very tied to the album. Diarmuid Farrell and I really bounced off each other. We have really similar views around art and the world. We’re both artists who are really left wing, have the same sense of humour and really into football which is quite rare. So much of Old Earth is me and him bouncing ideas off each other and visual and sonic things we both really like. 

The tour is going to be full of music I only make for the live shows, which I think is some of the best music I’ve ever made. Lots of remixes and edits. One of the songs in my live shows is a version of “Bella’s Lullaby” from Twilight. It’s real fried and very emotional, over the top dramatic shit.

[Rory finishes the interview by playing a really scratchy off-tune tin whistle solo for me. It hurts my ears].

Go Listen to Old Earth Now!!

Written by Alex Kelleher (@alex_kelleher_)

Edited by Ieva Dambrauskaite (@ievadambrauskaite_)