Did a radical pianist in 1950s Dublin really inspire Jean Michelle Jarre’s landmark recording Oxygene? What drove the “strange feckless sound without apparent order” of the Keening Women’s Alliance – an improvising vocal group – in late 1950s Cork? What did one woman’s experiments on the Blasket Islands on the sounds of the wind and sea reveal about the Irish language? Could bees have inspired church-organ drone music in early twentieth century Leitrim? Who was behind rural, multi-media trance sessions in the late 1940s, and who on earth went to them?  What did free improvisation have to do with British…