PLUS MINUS ENSEMBLE

Enthusiastic Eunuch, In Association With The Arts Council Presents

PLUS MINUS ENSEMBLE

performing Jessie Marino, Bernhard Lang, and Sean Clancy

plus support

Ultan O’Brien

Whelan’s Main Venue • Weds 1st October 2025

‘It is extremely rare to come across a record that baffles, confounds and delights in the way this does.’ (The Quietus)

Plus-Minus Ensemble is a UK based ensemble committed to commissioning new work and placing it alongside recent and landmark modern repertoire. Formed in 2003, Plus-Minus is distinguished by its interest in performative, electroacoustic and conceptual pieces, and experimental open works such as Stockhausen’s 1963 classic, from which the group takes its name. In recent years, they have worked closely with composers Anthony Braxton, Laurence Crane, Natacha Diels, Francesca Fargion, Alvin Lucier, Cassandra Miller, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, and Jennifer Walshe.

Plus-Minus has performed at Borealis Festival (Bergen), Sampler Sèries (Barcelona), Fundación BBVA Bilbao, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Klang festival (Copenhagen), MaerzMusik (Berlin), Spor Festival (Aarhus), Transit Festival (Leuven), Ultima Festival (Oslo) and Warsaw Autumn. In London, Plus-Minus has performed at Kammer Klang, Cafe Oto, BBC Radio 3 Open Ear, Cut and Splice, City University Concerts, ICA and London Contemporary Music Festival. Plus-Minus is directed by Matthew Shlomowitz, Vicky Wright and Mark Knoop. They have release albums on Another Timbre, Neu Records, NMC, and Black Truffle amongst others. Plus-Minus is directed by Matthew Shlomowitz, Vicky Wright and Mark Knoop.

For their first appearance in Dublin, Plus Minus Ensemble brings a programme of recent commissions exploring loopy, ambient and experimental soundworlds, centred around Seán Clancy’s ‘Where the Paths End’.

Berlin-based composer Jessie Marino’s ‘Seahorses’ creates wonky, broken minimalism, combined with erratic timbral drones. Bernhard Lang’s ‘DW23 Loops for Dr X’ is an homage to Boris Karloff, Prince of the mid-20th-century monster movie. Seán Clancy’s 30 minute multi-movement work ‘Where the Paths End’ blends location recordings from three cities with instrumental textures to create a sense of transcending space and time.

Plus Minus will be joined by special guest, fiddle/viola player, Ultan O Brien who will perform a solo set.

Ultan O’Brien

Ultan is a fiddle/viola player & composer based in County Clare. Ultan has a background in traditional Irish music and improvised music and performs as a soloist and in duos and bands with Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Martin Green (Lau) , Nic Gareiss, Slow Moving Clouds, Skipper’s Alley, Neil Ó Lochlainn’s Cuar, and John Francis Flynn.

In March 2025, Ultan released his debut solo album, Dancing the Line, through Nyahh Records featuring Nic Gareiss, Martin Green and Edwina Guckian.

‘There’s an understated virtuosity to these tunes — a weightlessness that lifts the spirit even in their plaintive moments, often propelled by the percussive shuffle of dancer Nic Gareiss, who taps his way across the album’s floorboards. O’Brien pays tribute to the experimentation that’s always thrived in the tradition, nodding to players like Nell Galvin and Packie Manus Byrne whose singular creative methods inspired his own development as a musician.’ — Eoin Murray

In 2020, Ultan and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin released an album, Solas an Lae, on the Scottish label Watercolour Music which was awarded Best Folk Album at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards 2021.

Since 2018, Ultan has been creating experimental films based around music compositions. In 2022, CCI, Paris and CMC, Dublin commissioned Ultan to create a film and score as part of Ulysses Journey 2022. The film, cling(ing) like fire, was screened in IFI, Dublin; CCI, Paris; SARC, Belfast, Budapest, Hungary, and at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022 and was described as “…dazzled transcendence, an art-full, hyper-realised, liberation in which wild collisions of images and movement, nightmare symbols and musical effulgence, collage together beautifully to spin our heads in the most beautifully Joycean way.” — Dr Stephen Graham

This project is generously funded by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon

Seán Clancy: Where The Paths End