Groove Tube: Stay indoors reaps rich reward with new album

“That started on the guitar,” Richardson says.

“I recorded the guitar parts and then put all the other droning effects over it, and at some point, realised they sounded better on their own. That’s how it became an instrumental. Main Theme was a working title but I liked it, and I kind of thought, what if it was something that sounded like a soundtrack?

“Usually you buy a soundtrack and the first track is just the main theme.

"This isn’t very original by the way. I’m not the first person to make an album and try and give it that soundtrack [feeling], but that’s what guided me throughout and led me to experimenting with putting strings and stuff on it.”

Richardson says there was never any concrete film production in mind to accompany his writing of the album. The concept of the soundtrack was looser, steering a general atmosphere.

“I listen to a lot of Danny Elfman soundtracks and John Williams,” he says.

“I don’t listen to classical music per se – soundtracks would be the only classical music I [understand], because I’m a big movie fan.

"It was just a case of trying to bring something like that to the songs, without making them fit any sort of imaginary film in my head or anything like that.”

Porkstore began about a decade ago, when Richardson was living in Canada and started using a tiny handheld recorder to log his songs. It is basically still the same setup, albeit with an updated version of the device.

“I put out a cassette in 2019 and I didn’t really do anything for a few years. It was when I moved out to Oughterard, being out of town and not having quite the same social life that you would in the middle of Galway city, that I started into it a bit more seriously again.”

Some of the lush and expansive sounds on Stay Indoors came courtesy of tinkering with midi-keyboard effects, though there remains an acoustic core to the album that feels somewhere in the realm of folk music.

“Folk is something I kind of drifted into, a little bit unwillingly when I was a teenager and when I first started playing guitar,” Richardson says.

“I was an angsty teenager. I wanted to play punk rock and be Kurt Cobain basically. I just found myself drifting more towards slow fingerpicking and that folk thing snuck its way in. Eventually I got to like it.

“Neil Young would be a big influence on me. Especially my last EP, Kids These Days, I really leaned into the folk sound for that.

"That’s kind of half my musical identity for lack of a better term, even though I don’t listen to an awful lot of folk.”

Four or five days before the first Covid lockdown, Richardson bought a second-hand chord organ that ended up providing the impetus for the penultimate track on Stay Indoors, Island-Shaped.

The song is a return to the soundtrack heartbeat of the record, predicated on a sweet but haunting melody.

“I didn’t do anything with it for a long time, but when I first sat down with [the organ], that was the first melody that came out,” Richardson says.

“When I was putting the album together, I remembered that and went back to it and added the strings and all. It fit with the whole soundtrack plan that I had.”

Away from the instrumentals, Richardson says there is no overarching lyrical theme to the songs that do contain words on the album.

One incorporates Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, which he briefly underwent several years ago.

“You focus on one particular memory, and really look at it from every angle,” Richardson says.

“Remember every detail of the room you’re in at the time, stuff like that.

"Anyway, it didn’t work and I hated it. That’s what science">Science Isn’t There Yet is about.”

If you look Barry Richradson up online, one of the first results is a song released by Galway indie band So Cow (the recording project of Richardson’s long-time friend Brian Kelly) in his name over a decade ago.

It is a relic of a different time, romanticising the notion of a pint with Barry Richardson in lieu of the responsibilities of life in its fourth decade.

“We’ve been friends for years,” Richardson says of Kelly.

“The song was kind of a surprise. He played a show in DeBurgo’s one night in, I think, 2011. He debuted that song and my jaw was on the floor.

“But the song’s not really about me. I think the song was about him turning 30 and dealing with that, and I kind of became a character in the lyrics, I guess.

“A pint with Barry Richardson was pretty reliable at the time.

"I spent a lot of those days in the Róisín Dubh, but I haven’t been there in years now because I’m almost 40. I can’t do that anymore.”

Richardson doesn’t plan on gigging as Porkstore. He would struggle to recreate the songs in a live environment and isn’t sure he trusts his voice enough to carry their melodies.

For now, Stay Indoors will live on Bandcamp alongside the remainder of his discography.