Alchemy. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In an increasingly busy field, we value more than ever those who can put one and one together and make three. The trick being to make this perfectly palatable; a successful transmutation of varying elements that somehow makes sense, in our heads and in our hearts.

Seamus Fogarty is one of those new artists on the frontline of music magic. An Irish alt-folk and electronica alchemist, he may be following in the footsteps of the likes of Tunng, Adem and the like – what we used to call folktronica. The path he is beating is decidedly different from these artists, who are not really folk by the standards of the old school and who gently ease electronica into their soundscapes so as to not overturn the wheelbarrow, as it were.

Fogarty, however, sounds like a true folkie, whilst also sounding at times like he’s from the avante-garde. As a live musician he tends to play the role of traditonal folk singer and player but, on record, he indulges his passion for new creations. He takes a blowtorch to his building blocks of traditional instrumentation and electronic gadgetry and fuses them together in some unlikely ways. So, what we get on this, his second album, is a mash-up of industrial and electronic sounds (wheezes, whirrs, bleeps, scraping, pounding etc) alongside various stringed guitars, accordion, and plenty of field recordings of voices. Moreover, there's electric bass and drums, in attempting to gel these elements together, all helped along by musicians such as the multi-instrumentalist Emma Smith, Rozi Plain, and producer Leo Abrahams. For the most part, it works.

Although he sounds as Irish as gaelic football, Fogarty now lives in London, and The Curious Hand is indeed a curious diary-like record that encompasses Ireland and London, but also time spent in America. There's tales of heading back from the pub but ending up at mass (the stomping techno-folk of 'Carlow Town'), of his time spent working on building sites and being a bouncer in Chicago ('Christmas Time on Jupiter'), and of the troubled morass of commuters bustling their way into London ('Van Gogh's Ear'). There's also elements of surreality throughout. For instance on 'Short Ballad For A Long Man', Fogarty intermingles folk tale-style storytelling with matter-of-fact narrative: "As a young man I was never one for sitting still at school, when I went to London town and paid to play the fool… paid a fisherman to throw me overboard, but my dying wish it was ignored. They stole my body and boiled it to the bone", he sings about discovering the legendary 'long man' skeleton of Irish giant Charles Byrne in a museum one day, Fogarty's voice and accompanying violin eventually joined by acoustic guitar, fluttering clarinet, and moments of harsh electronic swathes. In Fogarty's hands (who has remixed records previous to this, such as for Yorkston-Thorne-Khan) these electronic elements are like instruments in themselves, adding textures, colour and theatre. It's there on the love song 'Heels Over Head' where a disconcerting short burst of electronica gives way to classic acoustica, but which gently grooves along a bass and drum rhythm section, weird and seemingly random glitches of industrial electronica intruding here and there.

Elsewhere, there are short songs of instrumental and experimental electronica ('St John’s Square') mixed in with avante-garde percussion, and acoustic-electronic-field voice hybrids, such as 'Tommy the Cat', which features conversations and some kind of shouting competition in Ireland. It's not all entirely successful. The triumvirate of inter-linked songs towards the end, which are ironically more straighforwardly traditional ('Mexico', 'Christmas Time on Jupiter' and 'Seems Wherever'), are rather aimless, Fogarty sounding overwhelmed by the travails of life that are the subjects of these songs. The final track 'Number One' brings a much needed dose of humour back to proceedings, via the country-folk style, and wry lyrical content: "Finding a good woman is like writing a good song, first it sounds amazing, but soon there's something wrong / I had a number one, years ago, but someone stole my song, I heard it on the radio."

I doubt very much he will ever get that number one, for Fogarty is simply a little bit too different. The Curious Hand he has discovered something fresh and original, in largely successfully marrying the ancient with the modern.

Jeff Hemmings

Website: seamusfogarty.com
Facebook: facebook.com/seamusfog
Twitter: twitter.com/seamusfog