It's strange but true. From improvised studios shoehorned into small rooms, hundreds of self-appointed producers have been issuing endless streams of digital music, with the genres as diverse as the quality. It might be smokey hip-hop loops from da ghettos of rainswept Galway, or swampy funk burbling up from the Lee Delta - or maybe a little intricate techno from the mountain wilds of deepest Kerry.
Close up, the phenomenon (and it's nothing less) can seem a touch geekish - pale souls huddled behind drawn curtains, twiddling with computers, mumbling an impenetrable jargon about Sysex data and Midi sequencing and Vestax dub plate burners, the ambient noise a squall of grooves and bleeps sizzling from the speakers.
This cottage industry has developed because the big thing about technology right now - or the liberating thing - is not the universal reach of its tentacles so much as its increased affordability.
To get an idea of the distance travelled, picture an English country mansion in the late 1970s and picture, in flowing gown, the young Kate Bush feverishly working out her debut releases. To give her wispy and ethereal pop the grandeur of some orchestral swell, she's hooked up a Fairlight sequencer. It's just on the market, a squat state of the art machine with many buttons and knobs, you'd need a truck to shift it and it costs £35,000.
Today, you can rubbish the output of that Fairlight with a computer programme that will cost a few hundred pounds or, if you are in any way sussed, a knocked-off copy for the price of a few drinks. You can run the programme on any old PC, even a 386 hauled out of a skip.
This is plenty to start off with but you'll probably want to add a good sampler: you can spend as much as you have but £500 or so and you're laughing. Some old keyboards from dusty music shops might help add some texture. And you'd be amazed at the old studio effects boxes and assorted geegaws you find lying around. Bedroom producers have a habit of degenerating into thrift store junkies.
All of this has been going on for some years now. But while digital music has been tweaked to infinity and polished to a high buff in many a bedroom, it has to date lacked an outlet or a reliable distribution system. Maybe this is beginning to change. Over the past couple of years, a handful of independent labels have surfaced in Irish cities and as they begin to shift their activities up a couple of gears, more and more product is reaching the shelves.
A case in point is Southern Fried, a compilation CD released by Prime Time and Tuna Records in Cork. It features 14 tracks put together in home studios in and around the city, and the quality is consistently high.
"We advertised and ended up with something like 35 submissions from independent producers around Cork," says Joe Kelly of Tuna, "so I'd guess that by now there has to be 50 or 60 baby studios up and running. I think the tracks are generally strong because when you work from home, there are no studio fees so you can have all the time in the world. And with digital music you can get a really polished feel."
The release is being distributed in the old school style, with boxes of CDs delivered to record shops around the country on a sale or return basis. But Tuna is in the process of setting up an MP3 site which allows music to be downloaded directly from the Web. "At this stage, people are still figuring out how they'll get their money from MP3, but it's obviously something that's going to develop," says Kelly. "But I'd see it as another avenue of distribution rather than something that's going to take over completely. It's not like we're going to see the end of record shops."
Many of the tracks on Southern Fried were put together on the most basic of equipment. Evolution by Resonance was made on an Apple Mac using the Cubase VST programme and filtering in a little live bass. Brian Ring's Check The MC was done in his bedroom on the family PC.
Others had a little more to play with. The Cork DJs Shane Johnson and Greg Dowling, who've been playing house music around the city for the past 12 years, have been adding to their studio piece by piece. "Up to about a year ago, we had a pretty basic kind of demo set-up but then we brought in a 24-channel desk and a better sampler and that's made a critical difference, it has really opened things up," says Johnson.
The pair, who record as "Fishgodeep", recently sent off some tracks to i! Records in New York, a label that inspires considerable awe in house circles, and it duly bit. The ink is drying on a contract that will see the release of four EPs over the course of the next year. The realisation has dawned that the local has the potential to go global.
Along with creating purely electronic music, home producers are increasingly working in collaboration with live musicians. In Dublin, the well-known club DJ Aoife Nic Canna has been putting together a body of work with a band called ra, the digital and the organic blending sweetly. She works from her flat, running Cubase off an old Atari and using a 1980s Emax keyboard.
"A new PC and an Akai sampler wouldn't go amiss but I can get by with what I have," she says. Hers is one of hundreds of fledgling studios dotted around the capital, cheap technology again providing a crucial impetus for the creative process. She works at the music every day. "Sometimes, when it's not going well, it can wreck your head - but it never seems like a chore," she says. "And it's like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it gets."
Westward to Galway, where Cyril Briscoe is preparing for his first release in the UK. With the Cork producer Stevie G, he has remixed a track for a Manchester act called The Aboriginals and it's being released on the Fat City label in the next couple of weeks. "I was just messing around with some beats in the bedroom and Stevie put on an a cappella version of The Aboriginals track and the whole thing came together really quickly. It was all done here in the house," he says.
CYRIL's band, Dextris, which features the singers Aisling Kelly and Tracey Kelliher, are also expected to release in Britain over the coming months, possibly on the acclaimed Grand Central label. "The girls' voices are really soulful so it's got a kind of R&B feel but when you strip it down, it's basically hip-hop," he says.
Fresh releases are beginning to surface almost by the week and over the summer, several projects that sprung from a DIY ethos will see the light of day. Fireside Records in Galway is due to release Advance Warnings, work from the hip-hop duo Jack Doyle and Tommy Reilly. Meanwhile, the independent Catalpa Records is releasing a CD called Forty Shades Of Greed showcasing new work from the rapper Ri Ra, who previously appeared with the cultish Scary Eire. Also in Dublin, much is expected from the vaunted Hotdrop label, which dabbles at the jazz, soul and funk end of the dance music spectrum.
Similar tales are surfacing right around the country and over the past 12 months or so, there seems to have been a qualitative leap in the quality of home-produced digital music. From here on in, it looks like the bedroom Spectors will be limited only by the stretch of their ambition.
