No pressure for Jape as Choice winners release new album

Jape, one of the most consistently captivating acts in Irish music, play the Róisín Dubh this Saturday, October 8 to celebrate the release of their fourth album Ocean of Frequency. Its predecessor, Ritual, released in June 2008 went on to win the esteemed Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year for 2008– which could mean that front man and songwriter Richie Egan feels the pressure this time around. But he doesn’t.

“Not so much, to be honest,” he says. “I put pressure on myself to try and write the songs that I wanted to write. Now I feel like I’m proud of those songs, so in terms of that I’m happy enough.

“It took a while to write them,” he continues. “I want to try and make the songs sound the way I want them to sound, so if I’ve managed to pull that off then I don’t feel any pressure after that. It took a long time to do it; there were a few blind alleys.”

Richie nearly released Ocean of Frequency in 2010, but his perfectionist streak kicked in.

“I thought it was finished last year,” he recalls. “And then I listened to it, there was something niggling, not quite right with it. I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I went away from it for a few months, did other stuff and then came back to it. Then I was quite quickly able to pick out the stuff that I thought was wrong with it, which was good.

“I had a really productive month or two. I wrote about 14 songs – it felt like a tap had been turned on in my head, basically. Between those two batches I was able to piece together what I think is the right album.”

Jape, who are sometimes described as an electronic rock band, played a cracking set at this year’s Electric Picnic and have also been showcasing new songs over the past month. How is the new material going down?

“It’s starting to come together now,” Richie says. “As a band we’re getting tighter. People would’ve heard some of it; they’re starting to get familiar with the songs. We played in Clonakilty and it was amazing; the place was leaping from the start to the end of it.”

Richie Egan is joined in Jape by Glenn Keating, Matthew Bolger and Neil O’Connor. They also play together in the Redneck Manifesto, an instrumental rock band whose live shows are raved about. How do Jape’s hook-laden songs come about?

“I write everything, the bones of the song,” says Richie. “So the structure will be done, and the lyrics. And then the lads . . . we’ve been playing together so long, I never tell them what to do. They usually play stuff that’s really cool over the top of it; they bring their own thing to the table.

“You need somebody to give you constructive criticism. That’s why I love playing with the Rednecks as well, because we bounce stuff off each other. It’s good to forge something together.”

Jape songs are a melting pot of samplers, guitars and keyboards. This means Richie isn’t stuck on one way of making music.

“What I tend to do is try to approach writing songs from a few different ways,” he says. “Some I would write on guitar, others I would write with just samples, others I would write with keyboards, maybe. One thing I would usually get is melody – I always try to pick out the melody. Then if I can think of an idea, a theme sort of, I try and fit that melody with the theme.”

A theme that sparked Richie’s imagination was the work of Michael Talbot, an American writer who drew parallels between mysticism and physics. The title Ocean of Frequency comes from an interview with Talbot.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.