Colum McCann

He seemed to be layering the music, sound upon sound, meaning upon meaning,

I had no idea how anyone could coax such a series of sounds out of a violin.

There was something otherworldly about it, like he had appeared from the liminal zone.

It didn't disappoint me when I learned that the musician was live looping.

using an electronic pedal and feeding the sound back into a continuous loop, then adding another more complicated, more considered layer that gave meaning to all the other sounds.

How he rung upon the rain of a whimpling wind.

The music then belonged to me, and it was bringing me home.

Brute beauty and buckle, ah, the fire that breaks from thee then.

He became my friend, Mielse Gosia, call him Moccanumra.

It turned out that we'd grown up no more than a mile from one another in Dublin.

But we were a few years apart, and we had gone to different schools, and we even gave ourselves to different languages, but that hardly mattered.

In that liminal zone of music and literature, we'd known each other for a long, long time.

Don't ask me to sing, ever.

Primarily because I can't, and maybe, to my shame, because I will.

Still, I have my reading voice, and I know the music of a text.

So himself and myself, we began to gig together in New Orleans, Belfast, Pretoria in South Africa, Paris, Dublin, Limerick, and perhaps nowhere more powerfully than in the West Bank of Palestine, where we went together beyond the wall into refugee camps and cafes and schools to shake our tired souls out

In a garden one afternoon we found a pair of tear gas canisters and Colm clicked them together for sound.

On a rooftop cafe overlooking Bethlehem, the sounds found their sister sounds.

Another time, we heard the music of the dachba floating in with the air of the musine, and so Colm caught the given note, and like Seamus Heaney, he rephrased it into the air.

The road to Jericho gave me a chance to say,