The Students of United Bible Studies

There is a photograph of United Bible Studies taken around 2015: six people, James Rider, Alison Cotton, Matt Leivers, Michael Tanner, Alison O'Donnell and David Colohan. It is accurate and misleading at once, and the gap between the two is more or less the subject of this piece.

Accurate, because these are real members of a real band who had by then been working together for years. Misleading, because six months earlier or later the picture would have held different people, and because over its lifetime the group has involved a cast that Colohan puts at more than two hundred.

United Bible Studies stretches the word band almost past its usual meaning. It behaves more like an institution with the door left open, and its members describe belonging to it, half in jest, as a studentship. Alison O'Donnell, who joined in 2008 after singing on one of the defining Irish records of 1972, calls herself "a student of United Bible Studies since 2008". Dom Cooper puts it more plainly: an open band, willing to let anyone get involved, with performers beyond counting.

Around that open door, over twenty-five years, grew a scene: several record labels founded or run by people inside it, a touring circuit from Galway to Massachusetts, festival appearances across Britain, Ireland, Denmark and the United States, and a set of preoccupations that stayed remarkably consistent given how many hands passed through. It has rarely been documented as a whole. Individual records have been reviewed, sometimes very well, while the network that produced them survives in pieces.

This is an attempt at that map, and an attempt to say what the music was for: what the people making it thought they were doing, working in a tradition that has been contested in Britain and Ireland for most of a century.

I. Dublin, 2000 or 2001

The founding is dated variously. Some accounts have the band formed in Dublin in 2000; the group's own materials say 2001. The circumstances are clearer than the year. James Rider was studying at Trinity College Dublin and David Colohan had recently come back from Australia. Already friends, they spent an afternoon listening to Incredible String Band records and decided to make music together. The name came from a prayer book belonging to one of the early participants, and it was a joke. The plan was a duo, which did not last.

The reference point mattered. The Incredible String Band were Scottish, self-taught and wilfully strange; the other obvious model of the period, Fairport Convention, had spent the late sixties working out how to put a rock rhythm section behind ballads collected in the nineteenth century. Neither offered a template for Irish traditional music, and neither is what United Bible Studies became. What both offered was licence, proof that old material could be handled, irreverently, by people who had not inherited it.

At almost the same moment another route into this music opened. Gavin Prior met Colohan and other future collaborators at an improvisation workshop during an AMM weekend in Dublin, hosted by Eddie Prévost. Murmansk grew out of the encounter, and Deserted Village existed at first partly to get that music into circulation. Prior has been explicit about what survived from the workshop: improvisation kept the personnel around United Bible Studies open and flexible. The chronology is therefore untidier than the story of a folk group slowly discovering experiment. The two were there side by side almost from the start.

Colohan had already been recording. "When I was eighteen I began recording as Agitated Radio Pilot," he has said, "putting out many tapes of primitive home recordings." The project ran under his name until 2011 and produced, in World Winding Down, one of the more substantial Irish songwriter records of its decade, twenty-four tracks cut in Ballymahon, Mullingar, Galway, Dublin, Corrigeenroe and the Welsh hills between February 2005 and August 2007. Rider played in Cubs and would found the Belfast label deadslackstring. Between the two of them and Prior, who co-founded Deserted Village with Colohan, the infrastructure was in place within a few years.

The early sound was loud. The band's own account describes a move "from raucous group improvisations that led them to share stages with Sunburned Hand of the Man and Charalambides" towards the mellower, song-centred music of the later records. Those two names place them exactly. Sunburned Hand of the Man, from Massachusetts, and Charalambides, from Texas, were central to the American free-folk underground of the early 2000s, the loose movement the press was calling New Weird America. United Bible Studies shared their bills.

The first album already carried the collective method inside it. Much of Stations of the Sun, Transits of the Moon came from two sessions recorded straight to open microphones, without overdubs, the players sitting together and breaking into smaller combinations. They were supposed to be rehearsing for the Mór Festival the following week, and they recorded new music instead.

II. The transatlantic circuit

Before the American circuit there was Damo Suzuki. In 2005 United Bible Studies became his Sound Carriers for a performance at Richardson's in Galway. Suzuki's method required a local formation, usually unrehearsed and often barely assembled before the show. A contemporary account describes a room without a proper stage, about a hundred people, two drummers, bass, electronics and tenor sax; during the set instruments changed hands, the sax became a bugle, the percussion multiplied, and at one point two tin whistles were playing together. Suzuki stood inside the formation.

The door could open just as fast without Suzuki. In August 2005 the eighteen-year-old Vicky Langan played support to United Bible Studies in Cork with Eachtra. She remembers meeting the group that night and, within hours, being talked into travelling to Limerick to play violin with them the next day, on a bill with Josephine Foster and Mi & L'au. She stayed in the network, appearing later with United Bible Studies, Agitated Radio Pilot and Raising Holy Sparks, and eventually forming Meitheal with Colohan and Mike Gangloff.

July 2008, the Montague Bookmill in Northampton, Massachusetts: a converted grist mill on a river, selling second-hand books, with a room upstairs. On the bill were United Bible Studies, Sharron Kraus and the Norwegian duo Thinguma*jigsaw. The tour would take in Terrastock 7 in Louisville, the irregular gathering convened by Ptolemaic Terrascope that had for years been one of the meeting points of the international psychedelic and folk underground.

It produced two quite different documents. The Dreamlike States of United Bible Studies, a cassette on Fort Evil Fruit, was assembled from shows across the three-week tour. I Am Providence, issued by Jellyfant, isolates a single day. On 1 July the musicians went to Swan Point Cemetery in Providence and performed at H. P. Lovecraft's grave, whose stone carries the words that gave the record its title. That evening they played at Top Shelf on Tobey Street with the local musicians Alec K. Redfearn, Orion Rigel Dommisse and Manbeard and their touring companion Sharron Kraus, and the house performance was improvised and entirely a cappella.

Kraus connects this Irish scene to several others. American-born and English-raised, with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, she has been compared to Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs and called one of the strongest voices in contemporary English folk. Her first album came out on Camera Obscura, the small Australian label run by the late Tony Dale that was one of the most important international conduits for this music. Through Dale she met the American band The Iditarod, toured North America and came to know Fursaxa, Jack Rose and Espers, two of whose members, Meg Baird and Helena Espvall, later recorded an album of traditional songs with her. She has toured Europe and the States with United Bible Studies and sings a duet with Colohan on their arrangement of the shanty "The Lowlands of Holland".

The circuit was genuinely international, Dublin and Ballymahon linked to Philadelphia, Texas and Melbourne by touring, shared labels and the friendships touring produces. In 2013 Deserted Village put together an international compilation to help with Tom Carter's hospital costs, after the Charalambides guitarist fell ill on a European tour.

III. Who was actually involved

The two-hundred figure is Colohan's own and probably accurate on its own terms, counting everyone who ever sat in. The recurring personnel, people who appear across releases, band names, labels and years, can be established too, and the list is much longer than the usual accounts suggest.

David Colohan, from Ballymahon in Co. Longford, is the constant, and his side of the family tree is really two families. Agitated Radio Pilot began as home-recorded cassettes and lo-fi songwriting before opening into atmospheric folk, field recording and improvisation. When he retired it in 2011, Raising Holy Sparks rose, in his words, from its ashes, carrying the work towards instrumental composition, drone, ambient and collaboration. United Bible Studies sits beside both as the collective proper, the only one of these names that was never a solo vehicle.

Around these sits a thicket of side projects, many of them a single CD-R from a single session. Murmansk carried the openly abstract side of the work; Colohan has described it and United Bible Studies as feeding each other, one keeping the free playing while the other narrowed towards song. Taskerlands, his duo with Michael Tanner, recorded in an unlit Belfast attic during a hard winter: two long, austere pieces for guitar and keyboards. Meitheal, named after the Irish word for a group gathered for shared work, joined him with Mike Gangloff and Vicky Langan. Divil A'Bit, with Natalia Beylis and Willie Stewart of Woven Skull, listens to landscape by acoustic and electroacoustic means.

James Rider co-founded the band and runs deadslackstring in Belfast. His presence became irregular without turning into a departure, and twenty years after the founding he is there again among the participants in Twenty Voices.

Alison O'Donnell sang on Mellow Candle's Swaddling Songs, released in April 1972 and now the most valuable and most mythologised object in Irish acid folk. It was cut the previous December in sessions running from ten in the morning until three the next; she has said the intonation slips near the end because nobody can sing for that long. Her own summary of her career has some scope: "Aside from short-lived, little-known groups and units, I have been associated with Mellow Candle, Flibbertigibbet, Éishtlinn, The Owl Service, Head South By Weaving, Firefay, and then a student of United Bible Studies since 2008."

Áine O'Dwyer is the figure the scene's coverage has most consistently undersold. Born in Limerick and based in London, she asked as a teenager to learn the church organ at her convent school and was refused, and learned the harp instead. In 2011 she talked her way into playing the pipe organ at St Mark's, Islington, and recorded there over several months while the cleaners worked. The resulting Music for Church Cleaners, a cassette on Fort Evil Fruit in 2012 and a double LP on MIE in 2015, makes no attempt to exclude the building. In the label's description she approached the sessions "with a Cagean mindset", so that the vacuum cleaner, a child's laughter and the echoing chatter all became part of the music. She has performed with Charlemagne Palestine, and Anything Bright or Startling? came out on Second Language in 2013.

She is also the member most careful about what her involvement meant. Asked about the apparent religious content of her work, she separated her own project from the band's: "In the case of United Bible Studies, this was not my work, per se, and the band already had their name when I became involved." Her own music, she said, worked as a subversion of the Irish church's patriarchal history.

Michael Tanner, from Lewes in East Sussex, records as Plinth and has recorded as The A. Lords with Nicholas Palmer, as The Cloisters, Thalassing, Cat Lady with Matt Shaw, and as Bible Student, a joke about his membership here. He has since retired his aliases; the two albums issued in 2022 were billed as final.

Gavin Prior, in Dublin, co-founded Deserted Village and appears across the catalogue on guitars, field recordings and at the mixing desk. His own work runs well outside folk. Babbleon Cork is a three-part collage made entirely from sounds recorded during a residency in Cork, closer to documentary sound art than to anything else here, and he has played in the Primal Barber Trio and in Tarracóir.

Richard Moult was a recurring member for years and is treated separately below.

IV. The collective explains itself

For the twentieth anniversary in 2021 the group made a piece called Twenty Voices. Twenty regulars, friends and collaborators, among them Grey Malkin and Alan Davidson, were each given twenty-one seconds and worked by the rules of the exquisite corpse: each heard only the contribution immediately before their own and built on it blind to the rest. Nobody performing the piece knew the whole of it. The whole existed only once it had passed through all twenty hands.

Few anniversary records have explained the group behind them so exactly. United Bible Studies had spent two decades behaving like a folk process, material entering, changing hands and shape, moving on without a single owner, and here they made the process audible for a few minutes.

V. The labels

Barl Fire later returned the debut, first issued by Deserted Village in 2003, to circulation in new packaging, replacing the original artwork with images from the Rosarium Philosophorum. Leaftrail in Dublin kept performances that might otherwise have disappeared with their rooms: Live at the Warehouse (2008) collected all three of the group's concerts at the Warehouse in Fairview, a DIY space some of whose regulars went on to found Stitchy Press.

Deserted Village is a good deal stranger than a folk label. Its catalogue holds United Bible Studies and Agitated Radio Pilot, but also Woven Skull, the Leitrim trio whose drones and distorted riffs come out of a landscape known locally for ghosts, tree folk and the battle-calls of the Tuatha Dé Danann; the Primal Barber Trio, an a cappella improvising group; Tarracóir, whose instruments include tenor sax, trombone and garden hose; Drainland; Thinguma*jigsaw; Toymonger.

Second Language, founded in London by Glen Johnson of Piano Magic with David Sheppard and Martin Jensen, carries Plinth, The Cloisters, O'Dwyer's Anything Bright or Startling?, Moult's Celestial King for a Year, and I Lived in Trees, on which The A. Lords backed Mark Fry, whose Dreaming with Alice, recorded in Rome in 1972 and released only in Italy, spent thirty years as one of acid folk's expensive rumours. A Year in the Country issued Doineann and describes its own remit as "explorations of an otherly pastoralism". Cruel Nature in Newcastle, Wild Silence in France, MIE, Eiderdown, Reverb Worship, Was Ist Das?, Camera Obscura and Jellyfant are all in the orbit.

The network kept renewing itself after its first decade. Apollolaan Recordings issued The Gascoigne Observatory in fifty copies, recorded live and improvised in Wicklow in July 2010, from the phase when the folk element receded and the improvisatory method carried most of the weight. Pariah Child gave Cave Hill Ascension a later life on vinyl. The labels changed as their function changed: first to circulate the music, then to preserve it, finally to give a scattered body of work something like an afterlife.

VI. What the music was for

Here the sources thin, and it is worth saying so. There are few long interviews with these musicians, and much of what exists sits on blogs that stopped updating a decade ago. What follows draws on what they have said, and where I am interpreting I have tried to make it visible.

Colohan is the most explicit. Describing Cave Hill Ascension, he set out a method: "part of a series of albums using the idea of divining movements, an approach I've been working on as a way of accessing the numinous. A literal movement through landscapes and then exploring them in musical movements and divinations." Elsewhere, more compactly, he has said that some landscapes suggest their own sound.

The claim is stronger than it looks. The walk comes first and the composition transcribes it, so the record carries a movement through terrain, with the terrain doing part of the work. The titles bear this out with unusual literalness. Hill of the Moon runs through "The Ritual Landscape", "Medb's Cairn", "Knocknarea" and "The Ritual Seascape". Knocknarea is the Sligo hill topped by the cairn traditionally identified as the grave of Medb, queen of the Táin. Colohan is walking up an actual hill with a Neolithic monument on it and recording what the walk suggested, which is a different thing from inventing a mythic Ireland.

The same principle reaches arrangement. The Ale's What Cures Ye (2015), the collective's set of traditional songs from Britain and Ireland, was recorded largely on location: "Sullivan's John" inside Mupe Bay Smuggler's Cave on the Dorset coast, other tracks at Greenwitch, West Moors and Ballymahon. A traditional song goes back into a kind of ground, even where the ground has nothing to do with its origin.

The cave contributed more than reverberation. During "The Recruited Collier" the tide was coming back fast. Colohan, singing in haste, sang "take my heart" for "break my heart", then did it again, and there was no time for another take. The musicians got themselves out of the cave, and Colohan later remembered swearing never again to carry a harmonium up and down a cliff face.

The wrong word stayed on the record.

There was an earlier experiment with inherited material. The Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree began in Dublin in 2002, after Colohan acquired Peter Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain and Ireland. He and Shane Cullinane chose songs from it, and for some they ignored the printed notation entirely and wrote new music for the traditional words. Gavin Prior remembers coming home to hear "Le Bon Marain", one of the first pieces made this way, and being surprised to learn that the melody was theirs. It had sounded old enough to pass. Other songs were learned more conventionally, from recordings or sessions, and the project stayed more acoustic than United Bible Studies. The contradiction is the useful part: a group could call itself closer to traditional folk while replacing the traditional tune.

That is where the scene's preoccupations meet something older and much more contested. The recovery of rural song and ritual in these islands has never been politically neutral. In England the revival that began with Cecil Sharp's collecting in the 1900s carried from the start an argument about national character, that country songs were the true voice of a people obscured by industrialisation and that recovering them was cultural restoration. The argument had a benign form, since the songs really were vanishing and the collecting really did save them, and a malign one. The interwar decades produced Rolf Gardiner, whose enthusiasm for morris dancing, tree-planting and rural revival ran alongside a warm regard for German youth movements and a politics his defenders still find awkward. The materials that gave England Vaughan Williams gave it, in other hands, a mysticism of blood and soil.

Between Sharp's revival and the music made here lies the more decisive break of the 1960s and 1970s. Shirley Collins, the Watersons, Anne Briggs, Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band disagreed about what tradition required; what they shared was the decision to put songs back into use, sung bare, electrified, stretched, mistranslated or set beside material of one's own. United Bible Studies inherits that permission more directly than it inherits the collectors' idea of preservation.

The Irish version of the argument is built differently and is no less loaded. The recovery of Irish traditional music became entangled with cultural nationalism from the Gaelic League onwards, so language, song and place-lore entered the twentieth century carrying political histories that do not map onto the English revival. Irish culture also has an unusually dense relationship between named places, prehistoric monuments and written traditions of place: the dindsenchas, the medieval lore of place-names, is a literary genre in Irish, and hills, rivers and territories come with stories about why they are called what they are.

The scene's real territory was the archipelago between Ireland and England, a chain of caves, barrows, coasts, islands, churches and temporary rooms joined by travel and shared practice. Colohan's landscapes are specific and local, Ballymahon, Longford, Sligo, Connemara, but they do not stay local. The band is transnational by construction. O'Donnell is precise about it: "usually students from Ireland and Britain, but frequently extracting influences from contributors in other countries." So As to Preserve the Mystery was recorded across Ireland, the Western Isles of Scotland and the south coast of England.

The word that recurs, in the musicians' descriptions and in the reviews, is the numinous. Colohan uses the word directly. A German label distributing his work reached for Popol Vuh and "almost Neolithic atmospheres", a comparison that turns up in nearly every review he gets, Herzog's composer invoked again and again for a man recording in Longford. O'Dwyer's relation to sacred space runs differently: refused the organ as a schoolgirl, she later gained the instrument at St Mark's and let the cleaners, the vacuum and the conversations in the building stay on the record. What these people seem to be after is an experience, awe, dread, the sense of a place being older than you and indifferent to you, for which the old materials happen to be useful. The material does not dictate what is done with it.

VII. The one that has to be told

The public record contains almost no language of departure. Rider became less visible while remaining a recognised co-founder; Alison Cotton appears, disappears and reappears without ever becoming a "former member"; even Áine O'Dwyer, after building a wholly independent career, drew a boundary around her own work instead of announcing an exit. In twenty-five years there is no documented resignation and no public break-up, with one exception.

In November 2018 The Quietus published an investigation reporting that Richard Moult, a recurring member of the band, had links to the Order of Nine Angles, a British satanist network that researchers place in the wider neo-Nazi milieu. Published accounts disagree about dates and extent, and part of the reporting rests on an anonymous document. Moult denies ever having been a leader of the group and says he rejects its ideology. This essay takes no position on the disputed points.

What the musicians did is reported. The Quietus wrote that David Colohan had learned the previous year of what it described as Moult's continuing involvement, and that it was mutually decided Moult would no longer work with United Bible Studies. Colohan told the magazine that the far right is morally, spiritually and intellectually repugnant, and that anyone supporting it is not someone the band's members wish to be associated with. Paul Condon, on seeing the anonymous document, removed Moult's records from Fort Evil Fruit, saying he did not want to deal with anything with far-right connections.

The Quietus's wider argument was that the folk-horror revival carries a potential for retrogressive, nationalistic readings, which is the argument this piece has already had to make about Gardiner and the interwar English revival. The cairn, the ballad and the pre-Christian site are common property, and what separates one practice from another is what its people do when the question arrives.

VIII. Where it stands

Activity peaked in the years around 2011 to 2016 and has since dispersed without stopping. Tanner has retired his names. Colohan continues prolifically, with Darlington Point, the Visitations sequence and work drifting towards vintage synthesiser and away from the acoustic, and told an interviewer in 2021 that there are always several projects on the go. United Bible Studies persists; a 2020 live incarnation brought together O'Donnell, Dom Cooper, Graeme Lockett and Colohan.

Strange Is the Coastline, released on 3 October 2025, gives the clearest recent official account of where the name stands. Its notes describe Colohan and O'Donnell as the current core members, working with the multi-instrumentalist Steven Collins of The Owl Service.

O'Dwyer has built a solo career of real substance, with residencies in the Brunel Tunnel shaft and in a Franciscan friary in Limerick. Grey Malkin belongs here without needing to be called a successor: he is among the Students of Twenty Voicesand keeps intersecting with musicians from the same constellation. People leave one formation and turn up in another.

Twenty-five years on, what this scene produced is hard to name and has suffered for it. Too improvised for folk, too song-based for drone, too Irish for the English hauntological labels and too indebted to English models for the Irish traditional world, it fell between every available category. The hauntological point is worth making precisely. English labels like Ghost Box, and much of A Year in the Country, work mainly through mediation: public-information graphics, library music, vanished television, the memory of a postwar future that never arrived. United Bible Studies more often approached landscape by entering it, carrying the tape machine to the cave, the cairn and the church and leaving the weather, the labour and the passing voices in the recording. The practice sits close enough to hauntology to share shelf space with it and slides off the shelf all the same.

The name they gave themselves is better than any of the genre terms applied to them since. A joke found in a prayer book ended up describing the method unusually well. They were students, of the Incredible String Band at first, then of one another, and finally of the hills, caves and coastlines they kept walking up and into to find out what those places sounded like.

United Bible Studies is on bandcamp

Last revised: July 2026