about the record

Talkbox is multidisciplinary artist Michael O’Mahony’s third album and his first for 33-33. It’s his most complete and cohesive music project to date, a culmination of ideas, happy accidents, and compositions that have been cut up and re-arranged over many years.

The album’s sonic signature is the Vocaloid software synthesizer – the titular ‘talkbox’ – famously marketed by Japanese cartoon Hatsune Miku. O’Mahony became aware of Vocaloid in 2015 through the popular Nyan Cat meme, which employs the software. Excited by the emotive potential and realism of Vocaloid’s voice synthesis, he began to imagine an album that combined its capabilities with italo disco- and UK garage-inflected sounds.

O’Mahony’s album forms part of his wider project: an analysis of his subjectivity through art and psychotherapy. The music complements his writing and video work, which feature in his performances. He writes in chains of association, speculating on topics such as family dynamics, or the meaning of recurring dreams about a childhood game console. His video practice features footage of objects found in his parents’ house, such as his sister’s childhood My Little Pony toy and his retired psychiatrist father’s lecture tapes. The music, at once synthetic and heartfelt, imbues the writing and video work with a strange tenderness. Taken together, these various aspects of O’Mahony’s work form a meditation on the emotional attachments we make to consumer objects and the role of early life in character formation.