Tara Baoth Mooney and Diarmuid MacDiarmada Talk Rún’s Debut Album on Rocket Recordings

Transmission 256: Interview with Rún

Rún is an Irish experimental music trio formed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The band consists of Tara Baoth Mooney, a voice artist and experimental filmmaker with folk and choral music background; Diarmuid MacDiarmada, a longtime avant-garde collaborator and Nurse With Wound associate; and Rian Trench, a drummer and sound engineer who owns The Meadow studio where their debut album was recorded. Their self-titled debut album was released on August 22nd via Rocket Recordings. The record addresses institutional abuse, environmental destruction, and spiritual transformation through ritualistic improvisation and experimental methods.

Title: Rún
Artist: Rún
Release Date: 2025-08-22
Genres: Avant-garde, Experimental Music, Noise Rock, Psychedelic Rock
Label: Rocket Recordings
Description: RUN interview: Exploring the link between dreams, synchronicities, and their unique experimental music process.

What’s your earliest memory of wanting to make music?

Tara Baoth Mooney: Oh, well, I grew up in a house that had a Magnus organ with a note missing. So there was a constant drone in the bedroom, in the children’s bedroom, which was our bedroom. My sister couldn’t go to sleep without it. We used to just sing along to the drone. As kids, we used to sing along to the drone.

Diarmuid MacDiarmada: Yeah, I think my earliest musical creativity was I used to take the bits I liked from songs and I would tape, put that bit on a cassette and then just keep recording it over and over again so that I could just hear the bit I liked for 20 minutes or something like that.

How did you meet and decide to work together?

Tara: We had, during COVID, Jeremy and I were working together with another friend and Rian and I were working together. Then we kind of decided, oh, let’s all three of us get together and just see what happens, because there was a lot of lovely synergy and good kind of creative energy happening in those two separate projects. So bringing them together kind of caused an explosion.

What were the first challenges you had to deal with as a band?

Tara: It’s challenging to commit a body of work that has been evolving as it’s played live and as you’re working with this. It’s challenging to emboss it in an object such as a record, which essentially freezes it. It’s challenging to kind of be with that music in a non-evolving state.

How do ‘dreams, synchronicities, and other uncanny influences found in everyday life’ actually make their way into the songs?

Diarmuid: Well, sort of to go back to what Tara was saying about the way things evolve, I would call it a kind of a flux state. So it’s where everything is kind of churning and something can just kind of it’s like making a mixture and then something comes in and changes the flavour of the mixture. So sometimes like a dream can be very influential. Something in the news could be very influential. Something very random and funny can be very influential. Especially the sort of the way these things can kind of form relationships and you sort of see patterns and special meanings.

Tara: Synchronicities.

Diarmuid: Coincidences and all of this kind of stuff.

Tara: I think when you’re open to them and looking for them.

Diarmuid: I think somebody said maybe Arnold Palmer said about golf is that like I think it’s like he said he worked hard enough to be lucky a lot. So in other words, like you don’t get lucky by doing nothing. So when you do and you’re open to chance, you know, you tend to be more lucky. I think so. We get more stuff kind of coming in and just seeing patterns and interesting relationships and things.

Well, I was just saying that there’s actually a kind of a visual side to it as well as that. We’d be thinking a lot about other things than music, obviously. So it’s kind of a it’s the idea of creativity kind of permeating everything, every kind of layer. So even food is speaking to film is speaking to, I don’t know, anything going on.

Tara: Like on the album, which we just got recently. Well, so like the artwork, we worked together on the artwork and a lot of these elements that are on the artwork. Little elements, synchronous elements, things that we’ve collected, things, things that kind of are meaning making. Then, of course, then this Hendecagram.

So, you know, we’re kind of bringing we’re bringing those kind of synchronicities and those little dream state elements in into the artwork of the album and into our food. You know, it’s kind of an ongoing creative project state, really. Yeah.

So the album is more of a, you know, when I said it was capturing something and that it was kind of, you know, it’s now committed to wax. It’s very much a journey, an expedition because of that kind of evolving nature of us and the flux nature. Yeah.

Are there books, films, or other art forms that consciously or unconsciously influenced the creation of this album?

Diarmuid: Hugely, yeah. We were influenced by painters and movie makers and all sorts, really. Let me think. When we get together, like we will usually sort of maybe talk about painters and artists and maybe watch some movies or some videos or whatever. I remember actually when we were trying to come up with the sleeve for the record, we were looking at the Polish painter, if I can say his name properly. Zbigniew Beksiński. Then we felt he had kind of captured a certain atmosphere that we really, really wanted for this artwork. We were watching we watched some Alejandro Jodorowsky. We were watching the Quay Brothers movies just for atmospheres and just a way of thinking about things, I think.

So, you know, I think the three of us are very visual people as well. So. We probably approach music in a kind of painterly way, almost in a kind of sculptural way. As much as more so actually probably than traditionally musical forms, I would say we probably lean into a kind of synesthetic.

Tara: Synesthetic. The three of us making pieces, they feel more like sonic sculpture, sonic sculptures than linear compositions or songs.

How do you recognize when you’ve reached that “transfigurative ecstatic state” you describe?

Diarmuid: We do have a sense when something is not refined enough. You know, some people will say that the whole nature of art is actually knowing when something is finished. So it’s kind of like we have a sort of a state of definitely not finished and then it kind of rises a little bit. Then you go kind of like, OK, that’s enough, you know, don’t overdo it. I don’t know if you agree with me on that. I don’t know if the other guys would agree with me on that. That’s kind of the way I see it is. I don’t think we’ve really overdone it yet. So we managed to kind of stop us when it’s at some kind of state that seems like enough. We’ve kind of created that state for ourselves and not ruined it. Our soufflé stayed up.

Do you draw from Irish folk traditions?

Tara: Yeah, definitely. From the storytelling and from the music and the language. Yeah, absolutely. But again, we’re drawing on we’re drawing from that as well as drawing from other parts, other things, other cultural entities, other artistic elements. Yeah.

The album addresses both human and non-human suffering – why was that connection important?

Tara: Well, I guess the state of the world at the moment is revealing is revealing a lot of trauma. I suppose that is being played out in different ways. For instance, in Ireland, there would have been a lot of trauma around the Catholic Church and that would have led to institutional abuse. That idea of abuse and abuse coming from above is happening in many countries, particularly in Gaza at the moment in Palestine. So the album is drawing parallels between these kind of normalisations of abuse, really, and of. What’s the word for divisiveness, I guess? Yeah, divisiveness.

Diarmuid: Well, so. You know, you were asking about the sort of non-human side of it as well, which I think would be. Yeah, it’s. Well, yeah, it’s kind of a holistic idea that, like, you know, why? Why don’t we see the human side of things very clearly? There’s a kind of a whole picture of the living planet, basically, and everything on us being kind of just abused, basically. So it’s like the great abuse is kind of reflected in the small abuse of what’s done to a person. The way we are collectively as human beings, whether through actively or neglectfully allowing awful things to happen, like right through the whole. The whole picture.

Tara: Yeah, I guess as well, I mean, the. The greater abuse of of the earth is, you know, it’s it’s monetarily driven and a lot of the abuses that happen. To humans. Because of extracting from non-human and because of that abuse, a lot of the abuse that’s happening to humans is is supporting that system. They’re all, yeah, entangled.

Were there songs that didn’t make the album?

Diarmuid: Loads. Loads. So that’s that’s kind of the process of this kind of percolation idea is that there was a whole lot of stuff going on. Then, you know, through trying to focus, basically only a certain amount of stuff kind of got through the door. So we’ve been working since and in the same kind of way, some of the new stuff is kind of, you know, rising up to that that level where you think it’s it’s doing what it what it needs to do. So there’s there’s a big amount of stuff that hasn’t made it yet.

Is there a common thread in the album, a main concept, a main theme in the album?

Tara: Well, really, it’s kind of it’s about that journeying, journeying through kind of. A state of living. Burdened by the body, burdened by mental torture. The kind of, you know, attempt to get through life when things are really difficult. Then there’s a transformative element where kind of after all of the the difficulty of living in kind of a living hell, you’re kind of pushed through the thresholds of death into a transformative or rebirth state. So, yeah, so that’s the concept.

Diarmuid: Well, this this was not planned. So this is something that we’re almost reading into it after the fact.

Tara: Because we were looking at these subject matters, we were delving into these kind of dark places and this was the stuff that was emerging. That, of course, ties in with what we were talking about earlier in relation to the state of the world at the moment.

Are you working on a new album?

Diarmuid: Not exactly. No, we’re in our flux state. OK. Loads going on. There’s loads of things happening.

Tara: We’re making a lot of new music. Yeah.

Are you going to tour now?

Diarmuid: So we’re sort of introducing ourselves to a few places now. I think we’re going to kind of see what happens with, you know, how the album performs to see how viable it will be to kind of go to other places. So, yeah, we don’t know yet. We’ve got some UK, United Kingdom dates later in the year.

Tara: We’re doing a small Irish tour over the next couple of months and then we’re doing a small UK tour and then we’ll have to see what happens after that. Yeah. We’re open to us.

Photos courtesy of Rún

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others