Long-time heroes of Ireland’s underground electronic scene, Paul Morrin (Spectac / Front End Synthetics) and Dunk Murphy (Sunken Foal / Countersunk, have finally joined forces in the studio as Confirmation Getup. Though their friendship dates back to schoolyard mischief, they’d never actually made music together until now. The result is Style Time: a heady, gloriously crooked suite of modular funk, skewed electro and machine-led oddity. Built from traded doodles, fast instincts and a shared sense of play, it’s locked in as one of the Irish LPs of the year.
Here, they dissect the album track-by-track, tracing moments of offbeat inspiration, gear-driven glee and the kind of instinctive collaboration that can only come from decades of shared history.
Style Time by Confirmation Getup is out now on Countersunk.org
Dunk: I met Paul Morrin on my first day of secondary school. A couple of weeks later he called into my gaff wearing a camouflage baseball cap with three lit candles perched on the peak. Wax dribbles and everything. My mother didn’t know what to do. I thought we should become friends.
Paul: I called into Dunk’s house to intentionally frighten the crap out of his mother and it worked. I was “that lad’s a bad influence” until I eventually did business with his dad and now I feel like part of the family. We both started around the same time making electronic music at about 13 years of age.
Dunk: I’ve been collaborating with Paul via artwork for his Front End Synthetics label for years. It kinda shocked me to think we hadn’t seriously recorded and released any music together. Seeing as we both regularly tinker with synths in the evenings I suggested we start firing simple demos across to each other online.
Paul: Dunk emailed me a bunch of audio doodles of different percussive jams, and the criteria was to add something, anything, the first thing that comes to mind and to not spend much time on each. It tickled my fancy I have to say. I also sent on a few of my starts for him to work on. Once we were happy the guts of 14 or 15 tracks were in there somewhere, we met in his studio.
Dunk: We convened for four or five days total in my studio to assemble all the bits, edited them down and then added some Mr. Sheen. I suppose we have really similar tastes as all decisions were lightning quick and the stuff seemed to flow pretty unconsciously between us. Minimal conversation and a lot of laughs ; )
Sour Smock
Dunk: Paul started this one with the big wave-folded synth chunk. I added some clonk, whip and blah to dance around it. It’s so rewarding to set some patterns up to support a main element like this.
Paul: This was me messing around on my modular with mostly Doepfer oscillators. I sent Dunk about 10 mins of it and he put the funk and strings in. It didn’t need much work after that.
Camisole Shunt
Dunk: I started this one with a sluggish electro rhythm pattern on my modular synth. I love using analogue stuff to make computational music. You might not hear that in the end result but the experience of making it is really tactile and present. I was happy with the searching mercurial hi-hats (shout out to Joranalogue’s Delay 1).
Paul: This was one of the last tracks to start, I brought down my Lyra-8 and we created the chords with it, that gave it a lovely unsettling tone. The squelchy bits were added using a decrepit Yamaha CS30. It was a lot of fun adding in the farty bass. How we chuckled.
Pantaloon Prince
Dunk: This started off as one of my afternoon AFX SAWII Oberheim jams. There’s a little passing chord in there I thought Paul might dig on so I sent it over. After he worked his wizardry we laid down the rolling 808 rhythm together in the studio. It’s amazing how these blunt and brutal sounds can say so much with a little bit of love. Giving each drum voice their own channel for a tiny bit of mixing. That little plastic & rubber analogue snare snap still hits hard.
Paul: One of my favourite tracks on the album. I replicated Dunk’s chords creating layers of generative random arp bits over it using three different synths. If I recall correctly we originally weren’t going to add any actual drum beats to any of the tracks, rather use other forms of percussion, but some tunes just drew it out of us by the time we were finishing them, and I’m glad it did.
Garter Belt Fandango
Dunk: A lot of my stuff started out as jams on my Buchla Command and an analogue sequencer. I was hoping for an off-kilter machine funk that’s just about holding on to its groove. I had no idea what Paul would do on this one. He came back with these soaring string pads making everything tense and dramatic. Wasn’t expecting that. Then there’s Auntie Alice on vocals.
Paul: My grand-aunt Alice was a great warbler (and Can-can dancer). We were 5 mins from finishing in the studio one night and with a few beers in us I asked Dunk to set up a mic. I did some of my best Alice impressions and we then added harmonies. It wasn’t until Dunk reversed them that it really went into the spirit world.
Planing Girdle
Dunk: Paul started this one with this odd robotic arp ditty that made me think of the set from BBC’s Chock-a-block. In a vintage BBC mood, I started composing a three part planing harmonic melody on three big old monolith synths for maximum nostalgicals. Later when we got together in the studio I remembered that I’d bought a metal slinky toy recently. We attached a contact mic to it and hey presto: DIY Sci Fi laser zappers. You can hear these making up part of the rhythm track.
Paul: This was a Moog and Prophet combined to make up a jittery squeaky bouncy thing reminding me of a pre-war era wind-up marching soldier toy. Dunk added those gorgeous melodies and dubby drums over it. We finished it off with a slinky and piano.
Gary Shoehorn
Dunk: More Buchla chugging from me to begin with. I’ve never heard a synth that can sound so physical—like it’s inhabiting your body. I coaxed a simple locomotive pattern out of it and sent it to Paul. He came back with some seriously off-the-wall micro-collapso synth detailing that balanced things out. Things were getting funnier. I took an old Farfisa Rhythm Maker down off the shelf and started fiddling with the buttons for maximum Euro-tron.
Paul: Probably the toughest one to decide when it was finished. Also the most layers going on here in any track. Dunk broke out the talkbox for me to add some lyrics, so I took down the Vocoder for him. Adding a hand-made arpeggio with the MS-20 and Fripp-style guitar polished this one off. A lot more laughing ensued.
Cuff Link Express
Dunk: There was a bit of to-and-fro across with this one. I ended up building a modular synth patch that could run through endless permutations of a chirping, dubby pattern. Paul stepped in with the ‘phase-noir’ Falconhoof chords.
Paul: This was the lush Prophet again adding to dunks chirps. Dunk’s bouncing-ball bass drum and hats brought it to life, along with some carefully positioned notes that he added. The final addition was the somewhat eastern sounding tinkling on the Siel which I laid down and Dunk granulated.
Balfe’s Tiara
Dunk: There’s a 2003 Dublin indie short movie by Andy Keogh (Dogmedia) called Jennie Balfe that we must have seen hundreds of times. It’s a hilarious slice of Liberties Dublin life where a local teenage vandal is awarded a ham—for real. After I started with the shredded synth meanderings on this one, I titled it ‘Tiara’. When Paul brought Jennie into the mix everything made sense.
Paul: This was the only track I think I didn’t have an addition to send on to Dunk, as we sort of ran out of time before our first studio session. So we tackled it then but not much was needed. I laid down the sparse piano, and it was quickly decided our job was done here.
