Liminality, as a concept, is fascinating. Liminal spaces, for those who don’t already know, are those spaces between. Sometimes, it could be something as grand as between worlds themselves, portals, and borders that lay between countries, cultures, and even dimensions.
In Seamus O’Muineachain sonic study of the subject, they are often more mundane places, the neither here nor there feelings found in airport terminals, or the disconnection you might experience as you stay in spaces that will never acquire the trappings of familiarity or home, places that cultivate the sense of being slightly lost in unfamiliar, yet not exactly alien places. His liminal spaces are real, physical places, yet somehow not connected with the real world, at least not his real world.
And so the music on Liminality, Seamus O’Muineachain’s seventh album, reflects this feeling of being neither in one world nor another and is drifting, untethered, restless.
Over the course of ten tracks, he captures such isolation and directionlessness via digital statements rather than songs in the traditional sense. There are a few moments where groove joins the signature flow of grace and grandeur, such as “Feel Light” and its almost classical chime and charm, and “Ocean’s” fractured, jazz-infused waters, but for the most part, things remain less tangible, more illusive, less lucid.
Often, just the title alone is enough to set scenes and usher in scenarios of our own making, such as the gentle drop of notes that make up “Rain on Samhain” or the shards of guitar that find us “Between the Bridges.” The music might instigate an idea but we fill in the rest.
Armed only with these song titles and the beautifully vague notion of being in a place where worlds collide but do so without anyone really noticing, Liminality is a gorgeous, heady, and thought-provoking piece of work.
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