Saint Sister Explore The Power Of Silence

When Saint Sister formed in Dublin in 2014, they didn’t know each other. Harpist/vocalist Gemma Doherty and keyboardist/vocalist Morgan MacIntyre shared plenty in common: not just mutual friends, but the fact that each was from Northern Ireland (Doherty from Derry, MacIntyre from Belfast), having moved to Dublin to study music. But when the latter approached the former with the idea of starting a band, it came out of the blue.

“We really didn’t know each other, at all, to begin with,” recounts Doherty. “So, there wasn’t a friendship that we were trying to turn into something else. The beginning of the whole thing was the songs; was the music. Not having an existing friendship made it easier to just jump in there, at first. We had nothing to lose if it didn’t stick. But, it became quite clear, quite quickly, early on, that the two of us were clicking.”

MacIntyre had been playing, around Dublin, as a solo singer-songwriter, but was looking for a band. Doherty, having studied contemporary-classical composition, was coming from a different angle. In the other, they found reassurance that what they were doing was good. “Instead of just investing in yourself, you’re investing in another person, which makes it instantly validating,” Doherty offers. “If you’re on your own, it can be hard to convince yourself that what you’re doing is good enough, but it’s very easy for me to think what Morgan is doing is great, regardless of my involvement.”

"The beginning of the whole thing was the songs; was the music."

Four years later, things have changed. Though they may not have known each other to start, Doherty says that they’ve “spent pretty much every day together since”, creating “quite an intense dynamic”. After all those years together, they’ve finally arrived at their debut LP, Shape Of Silence, which captures the band’s mixture of folk and electronic elements.

One of the advance singles from the album was called, notably, Twin Peaks, with many connecting the ethereal sound of the song to the show. Many except Doherty herself, who’d never seen it when MacIntyre first came up with its lyrics, and title. “I intentionally didn’t watch [the show] ’til the song was finished,” confesses Doherty. “Because, that way, I had no preconception of Twin Peaks [the show] and its soundscape.”

Shape Of Silence, as a title, suggests both the record’s soundscape and its theme. “The name felt fitting,” Doherty explains, “because, musically, there’s a lot of space, and, thematically, it’s thinking a lot about what can be said when you’re not saying anything at all, or what can be read between the lines. The power of silence, and the weight that it can hold. At the beginning, it’s a little bit more upbeat; it’s almost conspiratorial, like two people in conversation with each other. And, then, as it moves through the record, musically, it fragments a bit; and, lyric-wise, the songs become a bit more lonely, and a bit more isolated. So the record itself has shape, and works with the different qualities of silence.”

As a duo, Saint Sister’s music, compositionally, works a lot with space. “There’s a lot of power in what’s not being heard, or using the power of silence, or the simplicity of an arrangement,” she says. As a harpist, Doherty takes influence from the composers — Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass — she loved at school (“the minimalist movement was the first thing I studied that really spoke to me”) and from the 'slow airs' of traditional Irish music.

As an Irish band playing folk music, Saint Sister’s music is thought of as being in conversation with traditional music; on their imminent first tour of Australia, they’re playing at the Sydney Irish Festival. “Everything at every point in life feeds its way in and influences you,” Doherty considers. “There’s no way of filtering that or stopping that. It’s quite ingrained. I think Morgan and myself, we both came to music quite differently, but both had the shared experience of growing up with Irish music, and Irish traditional and folk music. We never set out to try and emulate anything, but we never tried to take ourselves away from anything, either. Keeping with Irish tradition was never an intention, but it was also never something to avoid. We’ve always just done what’s come natural.”