After seven years, experimental funk octet Tongue Bundle prepare to release unheard music

As Oli Ryan marched up the staircase, he passed a large sheet of metal sticking out from the wall.

He plugs into it when he is recording music, he said on Sunday evening, holding up a small cable fixed to it. “If I’m recording a guitar, I’ll put it into this and it reverbs it up. It’s cool.”

His first-floor studio in Phibsboro is loaded up with instruments and devices to make off-kilter sounds.

A pair of guitars hang from a wall. Vintage organs with drum machines and reel-to-reel tape recorders, a clarinet, a double bass and a cello.

There’s an old broken wheelchair in a corner, repurposed for his outings with the trolley-based electronic band Acid Granny. He has fitted it with a bodhran, a xylophone and a small red autoharp.

The shelves are filled with sculptures of hands, parts of a piano, cassettes and six-inch boxes of reel tape, which he got on Adverts.ie, he says. “Some fella gave them to me. His dad got them from a priest.”

He’s been archiving a lot of them, he says. “They’ve all got these recordings from 50s radio, classical music, and one recording of a pub in Inchicore from, I think the 60s.”

But the reels are also great for adding texture to the tracks he records, be they for film soundtracks, his solo work or the music he records for other artists, he says.

“I’d record digitally and pass stuff through them, because they’re great for muckying things up,” he says.

For a split moment, however, Ryan has stepped away from recording new music, as he revisits and prepares to release a vinyl compilation of tracks from his band Tongue Bundle.

Titled Second-Hand Banger, the LP offers an overview of the experimental funk octet’s oeuvre, including live and previously unreleased tracks, he says. “Plus, we’ve never produced a vinyl before.”

Carefully considered lunacy

Tongue Bundle formed after Ryan moved from Mayo to Dublin in 2009, he says.

First, he met the drummer Cathal O’Leary and the mononymous guitarist Pob, who were in a band called Doctor Phantasmo, he says.

He and the others tried to produce a circus-concept record, he says. “Pob and I basically just spent two years changing it and refining it until eventually we just dumped it, like, ‘Fuck that fuckin’ clown concept’.”

Instead, they decided to form a band that was a little more grounded, he says. “And that was where Tongue Bundle came from.”

Their debut EP, the five-track Salty Language, was released in February 2012, packing in distant, distorted and occasionally demonic vocals with spaced-out, angular guitar melodies, abrasive and crazed synthesisers and slap bass.

The band grew from a trio to seven members, then eight, he says. “We just kinda met people along the way, and had trumpets, percussion, keyboards, and people were swapped in and out.”

They took on board anybody who was up for making music that was definitely not commercial, he says. “Find the people, as many people as possible, who were willing to put up with rehearsals, and it was a good band with a very low-pressure environment.”

The band followed this up with two full-length albums, Bungee Untold in 2015 and Peppery Talk in 2017, while also releasing noisier, looser, more avant garde music under the name The Barry People, he says.

“That was Tongue Bundle, but improvised, even though a lot of people thought Tongue Bundle was improvised,” he says.

That wasn’t the case though, he says. “A lot of consideration goes into it, even if it was always important to maintain an element of amateurism, dissonance.”

Used-car music

The band hasn’t released any new material since 2017.

They still gig from time to time, he says. The upcoming compilation has a live version of their track “Paprika Speak”, which was recorded at their most recent outing in April 2023 at Bello Bar in Portobello.

Due out on 7 July, Second Hand Banger has a handful of tracks from each of their past releases, as well as one song put out exclusively on a compilation and “Boy He”, which was originally recorded in 2013 and then updated 10 years later.

Originally a swampy, largely instrumental tune with booming, ominous vocals akin to those on The Specials 1981 hit “Ghost Town”, Ryan reapproached it in 2023, adding a collage of vocals, sung and spoken.

Choosing what went onto Second-Hand Banger was simplified by the fact that they weren’t aiming to pick what was recognisable or catchy, he says. “None of them are hits. We all just chipped in on a group chat, and tried to cover all the bases, most of the different sides of our stuff.”

The physical album is styled around old cars, as referenced in the title, and each of the 250 copies will have artwork that is slightly different, Ryan says. “It’s all car tax related stuff, tax discs and a logbook for the tracks.”

Once it is out, the band is due to perform at a few festivals this year and the one after, he says. “But I’d like to do another release of new stuff next year. So I guess the idea with this is to use it as a sort of kick up the arse.”