Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End

Release date: 15 May 2026

Where the Paths End is a new album by one of the most exciting Irish composers of his generation, Seán Clancy. Bringing together works written between 2013 and 2025, the album explores lived experience, repetition and loss through Clancy’s distinctive, deadpan aesthetic. Performed by the critically-acclaimed Plus-Minus Ensemble, it presents a focused body of work shaped by clarity, precision and emotional restraint.

The album centres on Clancy’s practice of “translation”: rendering everyday experiences into sound without commentary or judgement, allowing meaning to emerge through attentive listening. Environmental recordings, projected text and domestic sounds become musical material - drawing attention to both the monumental and the mundane.

A composer of “beautifully simple yet elusive musical phrases” (New York Times), Clancy is Ad Astra Fellow Assistant Professor at University College Dublin and previously taught at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Founded in 2003, Plus-Minus Ensemble is recognised as a leading ensemble for experimental repertoire, having commissioned dozens of new works and performing regularly at major international festivals.

The title work, Where the Paths End, translates walking through London, Birmingham and Edinburgh into sound. Using ambient recordings from each city as points of departure, the seven-movement piece reflects on urban change, memorialisation and the therapeutic act of walking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sounds that may never be heard again - and areas reshaped by gentrification - are preserved in resonant detail. 

Other works explore biography, grief and finitude. Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greeting Cards traces an anonymous life from birth to death, through projected phrases and a persistent piano figure that fades into absence. We Are Not All Here layers domestic sounds into dense polyphony before gradually yielding to sparseness, mirroring how grief settles. Five Lines of Music Slow Down and Eventually Stop charts entropy with five strands that lose momentum, its abrupt ending undercutting the preceding calm.

Across the album, Clancy’s repetitions are never sterile. Timbral haze and moments of rupture lend warmth to music balancing restraint and intensity. Where the Paths End offers space for reflection on memory, loss and the textures of everyday life.

Seán Clancy
Plus-Minus Ensemble

Format: CD, download, streaming

FUNDERS

This recording was made possible with the generous support of an Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon Project Award and UCD Ad Astra research funding.

 

Where the Paths End was commissioned by Zubin Kanga with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Fourteen Minutes of Music on the Subject of Greeting Cards was commissioned by the Little Missenden Festival with support from Britten-Pears Arts and Friends of the Festival.

NMC Recordings would like to thank: 

RECORDING CREDITS