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Artist
Michael O'Shea
12+ albums
experimentalfolkavant-folkinstrumentalirish
about
Michael O’Shea (11 July 1947 - 18 December 1991) was an experimental folk musician from Newry, Northern Ireland, who played a unique handmade string instrument he called “Mo Chara” (Irish for “My Friend”), loosely based on the blueprints for a North African zither. The instrument had seventeen main strings, with six more sympathetic strings which added a profound resonance similar to a sitar. It typically played by O'Shea with a pair of sticks (often chopsticks, drumsticks, or paintbrush handles) After years as an itinerant musician and busker among other odd-jobs, his unique musical style attracted the attentions of fellow musicians, culminating in a 1982 self-titled album which was his sole solo recording release during his lifetime. World travel informed his compositional style, particularly his study of the sitar and South Asian music generally in Bangladesh. In the period in which he was most active, O’Shea also collaborated with numerous figures from world, folk, and avant-garde music, including Ravi Shankar, Peggy Seeger, Don Cherry, The The, and Wire. He was largely inactive musically in the second half of the 1980s, although he did become involved with the early rave culture of that period. O'Shea passed away after being hit in a car accident in London in 1991 at the age of 41. His self-titled LP was re-issued twice, firstly in 2001, and then by the independent label AllChival Records Dublin in 2019. “Séance of a Kondalike (Backing Track)” is a bonus track on th
