Blackgate

10” – Hand Numbered 10” Black Vinyl Limited to 500 copies housed in a Custom 10” Deluxe Tip-On Gatefold with Half Speed Mastering by Barry “Bazza” Grint at Air Mastering Studios, London.
Pressed at Optimal Media, Germany, on 100g vinyl.

“Fabulous playing by Caimin Gilmore” — Journal of Music

“Caimin Gilmore’s upright bass-playing was reminiscent of Danny Thompson’s work, fluid and sunlit.” — The Spectator

vOn Thursday, June 5, 2025, Irish composer and double bassist Caimin Gilmore announces his debut record BlackGate, via Ten Spot Records (Dublin) in collaboration with New Amsterdam Records (Brooklyn) (out on August 1, 2025).
BlackGate features renowned cellist Kate Ellis, harpist Lavinia Meijer, and Caimin Gilmore on double bass & DX7.

Well-known as one of Ireland’s leading young double bassists, BlackGate marks Gilmore’s emergence as a major new compositional voice, in a style reflective of his expansive collaborations as a performer.
BlackGate is an instrumental composition and genre-fluid journey through myriad evocative sonic spaces, with exquisite writing not just for his own double bass, but for the harp and cello, accompanied by subtle Yamaha DX7 synthesiser passages that provide further sonic depth and colour.
The record encapsulates Gilmore’s idiosyncratic playing style, which has formed the bedrock to his work with artists across a diffuse spectrum of musical styles—from contemporary music to pop, classical and folk—in turn, becoming a manifestation of them all.

Gilmore is a member of Ireland’s ground breaking new music group Crash Ensemble.
An interdisciplinary and versatile modern musician, he has shared the stage with internationally renowned artists like Lisa Hannigan, Dermot Kennedy, Aaron Dessner, Jessy Buckley, Dirty Projectors, Sam Amidon, Greg Saunier, to name a few, and is currently touring with Irish bands Ye Vagabonds & John Francis Flynn (Rough Trade/River Lea).
He features on over 40 recordings, including releases from Damon Albarn, Boygenius, and on Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album ‘Thanks for the Dance’ with European ensemble s t a r g a z e, among many others.
Kate Ellis is Artistic Director of Crash Ensemble, cellist with Martin Hayes’ Common Ground Ensemble and has toured with Bono as part of his Stories of Surrender show 2022-2023.
Lavinia Meijer is a Sony Classical recording artist and the only classical musician to have reached the top 10 in the Dutch album charts for 3 consecutive solo albums.
Her recording of Philip Glass’ ‘Metamorphosis’ went platinum in the Netherlands.

BlackGate sits at the cutting edge of a long history of artists working within a wide range of musical styles dating back as far as Velvet Underground’s John Cale, and continuing through artists like Deerhoof, Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, and Ryan Lott (Son Lux).
“There has been a long lineage of non classical artists working primarily in ‘commercial’ music who dig from the contemporary classical music well & also write it,” says Gilmore.
“For me, the first time the idea that this cross pollination was rigorously happening was listening to NewAm Artistic Director William Brittelle at Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival (Cork) in 2019, chatting about ‘genre fluidity’ in music on a panel discussion with curator Mary Hickson.
I ended up doing an impromptu gig alongside William and the musicians he had brought over to the festival to perform his music.
That interaction cemented, and made sense of, how ‘classical’ composers and musicians were also working in genre-fluid ways internationally and this gave assurance to the idea that my musical ideas, amassed performing across genres, had credibility as a notated work also.”

On creating the work, Gilmore explains: ”I was interested in writing a piece that lived somewhere—harmonically and structurally—between indie and minimalist music; using extended string techniques to create a spectral sound world.
At the time I was playing and jumping across a broad range of styles—contemporary music, folk/Irish traditional music, playing in indie groups, and symphonic repertoire with orchestras.
I felt that the playing techniques I was using across these genres were transferable, and the diffuse sonic worlds were conducive with each other–they could live together if it was a reflection of how I approached them, or maybe how I understood them.
It felt most natural to me to write something with this cross pollination of genres in mind.
BlackGate as such became a natural reflection of the different types of music and people I was performing and collaborating with at the time of writing it.”

BlackGate was commissioned by The BlackGate Cultural Centre (Galway) using funds from the Arts Council of Ireland.
The commissioners intention was for Gilmore to create a genre-fluid amalgam andreflection of his multifaceted career.
The work was written, notated, and recorded over the course of a year-long residency for Dublin City Council.
It had its world premiere at Kilkenny Arts Festival (IRL) in 2024 and a further performance as part of New Music Dublin Festival in the National Concert Hall of Ireland, March 2025.
It will receive its US premiere on July 21st at the PS21 Centre for Contemporary Performance (Chatham), from Lavinia Meijer and celebrated American cellist Clarice Jensen.

Deluxe 4-panel cassette inlay designed by Ten Spot Records with layout by M&E Studio Sweden.
The album has been designed and mixed to be listened to on vinyl record and cassette.

The work is being released by Ten Spot Records in collaboration with New Amsterdam Records on audiophile quality 10” vinyl, cassette & digital, from August 1st 2025.
Each record is housed in a custom made – lithographically printed 10” Tip-On deluxe gatefold jacket designed by Ten Spot Records with layout by M&E Studio Sweden.
The album has been designed and mixed to be listened to on vinyl record.

Pressed at Optimal Media, Germany, on 100g vinyl.