Aine O'Dwyer - Gallarais LP

David Toop, on hearing Áine O'Dwyer's Gallarais and the subsequent conversations between November 2016 and January 2017. "Sleep music, the underworld. Twenty-six letters were sent, not far to travel, from Proust, hypersensitive writer to his upstairs neighbour, Marie Williams -- 'I was rather troubled by noise . . . I was trying to sleep off an attack. But at 8am the tapping on the parquet was so distinct that the Veronal didn't work and I woke with the attack still raging.' Marie Williams played harp, though it was not the harp that dragged Proust from the fumes of a bedroom armed against asthma attacks, cork-lined to smother noise.. . . Proust spoke of an imperceptible breath, 'like the wind breathing into the stem of a reed', mingling with the subdued song of his dying grandmother's breathing, 'swift and light . . . gliding like a skater towards the delicious fluid', the human sighs released at the approach of death . . . 'Who's there?' cries out the old man, stark terror pulled awa