Music is becoming more and more accessible these days. With the wonder of Moore’s law pushing technology further exponentially. A convincingly professional sounding album can be made for next to nothing. Not only is the vastness of studio equipment a thing of the past, but so are the pricy synths that were once common place can now be sampled and emulated.

With these ever progressing trends, a new genre of sorts comes forth, bedroom electronica. A more populist take producing if you will. Anyone can make music these days (with the require talent of course) regardless of their situation, and young irish producers are definitely taking advantage of this. I sat down to chat to Eoghan Reid of REID about his music, the state of Irish music, and chillwave.

There’s not a lot about you online. A bit of an enigma. The name REID, in a very bold all caps, comes across as a tad intimidating. So let’s try and break that down. What is REID?

REID, to put it simply is my second name (Eoghan Reid). All my life I’ve been called Reid by my friends, it just kinda made sense to me to call this project the name that I am known by. I was having a discussion with a mate of mine about band names and was saying I didn’t know what to call this new project I had started, I then heard someone call me (REID!!) from another room and it clicked. Just kinda took it from there.

I guess a word you could use to describe yourself as Chillwave, what do you think about chillwave as a genre? A fabrication or a genuine musical movement? How do you describe the music you make?

I think Chillwave is just another word used to help categorize music beyond your simple everyday genres. It’s a good thing because if I just described my music as Electronic it just wouldn’t give someone enough information on what I do. When I describe my music to people I just say it’s blissed out Electronica that you could dance to, I think that is as simple as I can get it without confusing someone with these words like Glo-Fi.

Over the past 6 months or so there seems to be this surge of young Irish producers. MOTHS, SertOne and Monto just to name a handful. What do you think is driving people to laptops rather than more traditional means of making music?

The talent in Ireland is phenomenal at the moment, I’m a big fan of all three of those producers and fellow cork-man Toby Kaar, I even had the pleasure of playing with SertOne and Toby not even a month ago with my band Zombie Computer. I think young aspiring musicians are driving towards electronic music nowadays is simply, because they can. People just didn’t have laptops back 10 years ago to mess around on so they just did what they could with guitars, drums and whatever was available to them.

Writing instrumental music do you try and convey some sort of greater meaning or do you just try and make something that’s pleasing to the ear?

I’m so bad with lyrics, I probably couldn’t recite the lyrics to any of my favorite songs. I usually find myself focused on the music of a song or I’ll been drawn in by the melody of a vocal, I just never pick up on the lyrical content. I try and convey emotions in my music, I find with instrumental music it can provoke different feelings as you are listening to it. I like to give songs a tense, dark, moody vibe which shows hints of happiness when the choruses drop, It’s hard to explain but I can hear it in my head when I’m writing.

So what albums would you have in rotation at the moment?

At the moment I’m listening to Interpol – Turn On The Bright Lights, The National – High Violet, The Naked And Famous – Passive Me Aggressive You, Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport and Health – Disco 2.

Where can people catch up with your music and what you do?

I just released my debut - Genesis EP last week and it is available as a free download on my Bandcamp & SoundCloud. I’m hoping to get another few tracks done in the next few months so I have enough material to start gigging and I hope to release another EP before the end of the year. Keep an eye on my Facebook & twitter to keep up with what I’m at.