In Hartstown, a writer and musician imagines the eeriness of the Dublin suburbs of the near future

It was a calm and cloudy evening in Hartstown, in Dublin 15.

Birds cawed. A few kids sat out in the middle of the street in a cul-de-sac, loudly gossiping.

The writer and ambient musician Richard Howard walked out from his driveway, apologising for his dog, who had hopped up onto the living room window sill to bark through the glass.

Howard, who records under the moniker Pure Fabrication, laughed as he noted the ambience of the suburb on this particular Monday.

It is something that has definitely influenced his work, which blends spoken word with groaning and ominous noise music, he says. “There’s a kind of weirdness in the suburbs that you don’t always notice at first.”

On the phone a few days earlier, Howard had nodded to his most recent album, Hub, which is composed of him speaking over atmospheric industrial drones, cackling magpies and samples of trickling water.

The cover has a heron perched on a nearby rooftop, watching a smaller bird on an electric wire.

The heron was on the roof for a few days, he says. “I was dropping my kids to childcare, taking photos, and one day I saw a couple of crows and magpies trying to scare it away.”

“Then I realised, ‘Oh, it was obviously coming to eat their eggs,’” he says. “It was one of those weird moments and straight away, that was the cover.”

It was an unsettlingly banal image of power, and it related to the science fiction short stories that he narrates over his music, he says. “There’s definitely this theme of a power imbalance there.”

Field recording and Weird Tales

Howard climbs the stairs to a cosy room where he records, overlooking his driveway.

The room is more writer’s office than musician’s studio.

One wall is a large bookshelf, filled with old VHS tapes and books by writers including Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, H.P. Lovecraft and Mark Fisher.

His music set-up is simple. One microphone, two synthesisers, a 90s sampler and a small effects pedal for echoes.

It’s useful for field recordings, he says. “If I need a sound, I’ll walk over to the park and record something like a football match and treat it through the pedal to get a sense of the suburbs.”

Howard had a background in electronic music.

He was a member of Deep Burial, an instrumental hip-hop duo, between 1997 and 2008. “I had that, but I also wrote a lot of science fiction, and I started to concentrate on that a bit more.”

After the band dissolved, he had a short story published in Weird Tales, an American magazine devoted to sci-fi, fantasy and horror, he says. “So I just had this backlog of stories, ideas for stories and I knew the means to do it was right there: make audio versions.”

His debut release, Scenes of Everyday Transcendence, came out in August 2021. It was three short stories with a haunting ambient backdrop.

“Those were older stories I had, and yeah, people just seemed to like it,” he says.

Irish myth and contemporary business

Howard’s work is a darkly humorous look into a version of Dublin sometime in the near future.

He was always drawn towards that version of science fiction, which looks at “the next five minutes” into the future, as the author J.G. Ballard put it, he says.

“I loved that because it stays on Earth and is more philosophical. It’s not as utopian or triumphalistic as the space opera is as a genre,” says Howard.

It is more grounded and realistic, he says. “And there’s more of a scepticism to it, which in an Irish context is kinda fertile ground.”

His stories tell of young men hatching plans to “disrupt” the funeral industry by innovating burial techniques in Dún Laoghaire, and gardaí discussing their roles in enabling corruption within the cloning industry.

He takes elements from Irish history and myth, and re-appropriates them to satirise the country as a hub for tech, finance and direct foreign investment, he says.

“How do you integrate ancient Irish myth with contemporary Irish business?” he asks at the start of “In the Cavity Wall”. “That was the question that started it: a question first posed in those buildings down by the docks.”

It dives into a version of Irish society where a tech company incentivises parents to let their children work as internet content moderators until their teens.

The company, like fairies who steal children and swap them out for “changelings”, temporarily exchange the real son or daughter for a synthetic copy.

“It’s an Irish company and for that, we should be proud,” Howard reads over the sound of a deep and haunting synth.

An eerie niche

To date, as Pure Fabrication, Howard has released four albums, with a fifth – The Rising Tide That Lifts All Shits – consisting of instrumental versions of Hub.

Putting out an instrumental companion album is something that draws from his love of hip hop, he says. “I got that from when you’d buy a twelve-inch single and they’d have the instrumental version directly after. You’d get the mood under the track, and I wondered if anybody else would listen to it.”

Certainly, it’s a niche audience that he is playing too, he says. “This is kinda a cult thing if it’s going to get any audience. Like, it can’t go on a Spotify playlist. What is it? Do you put it as music?”

Adding ambient soundscapes is also a way of getting his sci-fi short stories out to audiences who might not otherwise read those journals where they are typically published, he says.

“I mean, you see in literary magazines and writers groups that they’ll say: no science fiction and horror,” he says.

It was one of his motivations to experiment with creating a more immersive experience through music, he says. “There’s not a lot of other outlets for this. We kinda downplay the genre for more realist fiction.”