Martin Clancy is a native of Dublin, Ireland who primarily writes and records in the medieval village of Haute De Cagnes, France. He is the first artist signed to New York’s Seaport Music record label. He is the artist in residence for the Seaport Music festivals. Martin DJs these events as part of his collective band gLab (pronounced Gee-Lab). In addition to gLab Martin has a dance outfit called Martin Clancy & The Witness Protection Programme.
WHAT IS SEAPORT MUSIC?
The new label owned by the New York Seaport organization, the same group of people that puts on free summer shows on the NYC coastline, whose huge outdoor festival has been home to Hot Chip, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Battles among hundreds of other Indie and dance acts. www.seaportmusicfestival.com. They just released a free compilation that features all of this year’s bands.
ABOUT gLAB
gLab is Greg G (vox), Allie Jerome (vox) and Martin Clancy (music). The trio first met as Clancy, in the midst of a trans-Atlantic musical project with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, found himself in need of a savior to rescue his digital music files from a waterlogged, and seemingly dead, laptop he accidentally dropped into a storm drain. The files needed to be sent to the U.S. by that evening. Panicked, Clancy stumbled into a coffee shop where he found a phone booth and a tattered book of yellow pages bearing the date 1999. Flipping through the pages, Clancy spotted a small tombstone ad that read, “Mr. G Repairs…pretty much anything.”
After a quick call, Clancy found himself in a battered old Belingo van heading through the Dublin Mountains in the company of Mr.G. The pair ended up at an old brick warehouse — both a repair shop and home for Mr. G, and a one Ms. Allie Jerome. With the laptop dismantled on a workbench piled with discarded motherboards and a sundry electronic parts, the musical contents of the all-important files became known, which lead to the appearance of a karaoke machine. The rest of the afternoon merged into one surreal memory, with Clancy recording the musical noises of Mr. G’s improvisational verse derived from a Japanese server manual and sung through copper tubing, and Allie’s percussive accompaniment on a martini glass while continually shouting “oh oh oh oh,” and thus becoming gLab.
Today, Clancy returns regularly to the warehouse to write and record with Allie and Mr. G – who, respectively, mix and pour musical libations and offer online repairs for all manner of electronic devices. Information on gLab, as well as the retail sale of a series of bespoke inverters, motherboard testers and laptop chargers, is available at http://www.glab.cc