There is a great deal about minimalism in this calming documentary about the late musician Conor Walsh.
Over a series of interviews the softly spoken subject explains, in appropriately halting language, that he takes the same restrained approach to life as he does to music.
Much of the composition was done in the rundown hotel his family once ran in Swinford, Co Mayo. He tells us how “one hook leads to another” until, ultimately, the first hook is discarded and a fluvial repetition emerges.
For the most part, however, his analysis focuses on what he and his music don’t do. Late on, he notes that Dustin O’Halloran, of the influential ambient masters A Winged Victory for the Sullen, has synaesthesia, a condition that causes him to see music as colours. Walsh then notes that this is something he himself does not actually experience.
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Few listening to the music will be much surprised by his confessed early influences: Erik Satie, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Aphex Twin. (It would be astonishing if he hadn’t mentioned those musicians.) The sense throughout is that Walsh would rather not have to explain how his art works.
This could prove frustrating, but Keith Walsh’s film subtly works these conversations into a wider aesthetic that hums and throbs to rippling piano refrains. Often surprising images – tears upon a cheek, a hand by a stretch of barbed wire – suggest emotional connections without demanding the music be fitted to unintended interpretations.
The director made his film for the Arts Council’s Reel Art scheme, and, like so many fine projects in that strand, it feels no pressure to conform to conventional expectations. Much of Selected Piano Works (the title is a clue) functions as a soothing audiovisual staging of the works themselves. Some feature piano alone. Others insinuate electronic seasoning.
Many of those sequences could work in a gallery-based setting, but the film is also a touching study of a fascinating, if allusive, personality. Walsh’s is the only voice we hear, and although he is elliptical about the music, he has much to (gently) tell us about a life lived under the cultural radar.
He died, at the desperately young age of 36, from a heart attack, in 2016. One can hardly imagine a better memorial than this quietly persuasive, impressively original project.
In cinemas from Friday, August 8th
