Centuries of Learning is the debut album by Dublin musician Pádraig Cooney. It is a distillation of his creative endeavours over several years writing, playing and singing in Dublin’s alt-pop underground, and an attempt to approach a record, 13 years after the fact, in the way he approached 2008’s Land Lovers debut Romance Romance. That is, restricted to synths, guitar and drum machine, with a mixture of premeditation and improvisation, make the most complete one-person pop suite that his abilities would allow at that time.
The title 'Centuries of Learning' is taken from the song Space, where in context it refers to the accumulation of technical expertise and cultural knowledge by Europeans, put to the service of violent exploitation of the rest of the planet. However, as the album title, it says: "I've been at the music long enough, here's what I have learned".
Over the course of its 13 songs admittedly anchored in the aesthetics of the 1970s, you’ll find dark electronic passages (Off the Books), hints of Italian TV variety show instrumentals (Another Reputation Ruined), slinky French pop (Engrenages), the expansive Space, the hooky Green Light, the dark country rumination of Moonlight and the primary-coloured Talleyrand. Bronwyn Murphy White, Padraig’s wife and bandmate in Skelocrats, pops up for a star turn lead vocal on Houses.
The record was self-produced, recorded at home but mixed by the pros: Fiachra McCarthy and Daniel Fox (Gilla Band) working on roughly half the tracks each.
Lyrically, it’s a wild ride from meaningless musicality (Green Light) to imperialism (Off the Books), colonialism (Space), housing (Houses), environmental vandalism (Nature Walks), historical figures as ferrets (Talleyrand), mind-controlled killers (A Drifter Sings) and, beyond linguistic content, an instrumental that attempts to soundtrack a video of people messing on a diving platform during a big storm (Blackrock Diving Tower).
Padraig says:
"I made this record after coming up with the melody for Space in the shower in October 2020, without previously having had any intention to do anything. I wrote and recorded the whole thing between then and early February 2021 in a very intense burst of work. I know that I make good music when I pressurise myself to bring something from the flimsiest idea to completion in a day or two and there's a real thrill in that. Thrills were at a premium in winter 2020/21 as you may remember. There's also a purity in going it completely alone, making no compromises on the songs, doing everything yourself. It's not a superior way of working but it is distinctly itself. I ended up having to basically cut it in half to fit on 2 sides of tape, and it's lucky for the appreciative listener because there's a nice little EP up my sleeve there from the off-cuts."
