Selective Memory presents
HOUSEPLANTS
Button Factory
Fri 26th April. Doors 7:30pm
Tickets €24.50 + bk fee on sale now
The brilliant Paul Noonan of Bell X1 and electronic producer Daithí have joined forces to create HOUSE PLANTS.
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The pair have joined forces as House Plants, a duo that combines the best of both of their disparate worlds (Noonan is best known for his role fronting indie stalwarts Bell X1, the mononymous Daithí as a producer of electronic music), yet brings something entirely new to the table.
The roots of their partnership began when Noonan guested on a track, Take the Wheel, on Daithí’s album L.O.S.S. in 2018. When lockdown hit last year, they had both been busy with different things; Daithí was in Vietnam to play a St Patrick’s Day event and had a number of international gigs lined up throughout the year. Noonan had recently completed a music therapy course at University of Limerick “after 25 years of dicking around in a band”, and was on a 10-week placement at a Dublin school (which eventually morphed into his family-friendly lockdown project The Electric Kazoo, an homage to the Muppet Show house band The Electric Mayhem). When Noonan sent an email to Daithí, it was as much to connect as a friend than anything else.
“I still had the studio in town and I had loads of ideas that I really wanted to do something with – and having made that tune with Daithí for his last record, I thought it’d be lovely to reach out and do something else,” he explains. “And also, as much as I wanted to flex that creative muscle, it was about just reaching out and saying ‘Howiya’. I think a lot of musicians have been doing that.”
When the producer responded positively, he says, it suddenly became a much bigger prospect. “We hadn’t necessarily seen it as a separate, standalone thing; it was just us living in the moment for those first few tunes,” Noonan says. “And then we thought it deserved more than me guesting on his record, or him guesting on mine.”
Although he has collaborated with many artists over the years, Daithí was the right man to flesh out those half-finished sketches for several reasons. “Being immersed in the music of L.O.S.S., his last record, and seeing Daithí play, I just knew that he gets four-to-the-floor and can execute that classic sound that’s in step with the heartbeat and our very primal instinct to dance,” he nods. “I kind of dicked around with that myself,” he smiles, “but I don’t have the moves.”