setteesounds

D*MP, also known as Ryan Dwyer is a music producer from Dublin city. Having worked with rapper Curtisy, musician Saoirse Miller and spoken word artist Paul Gabriel Banks, D*MP’s catalog is extensive and impressive as he transcends genre and medium. D*MP is also one of the curators of LIPS2EARS, an Ireland based multimedia platform that showcases a huge amount of Ireland’s talent, from their ‘Car Boot Sale’ series, where live musicians perform while sitting in the boot of a car, to ‘Outside the Box,’ where DJs and producers can show their talent mixing and making music. Alongside LIPS2EARS, Dwyer also runs LOOSETOOTHDENTALCLUB but more on that later.

D*MP is the first artist of this evolution, SETTEE @ NIGHT, where we are highlighting alternative nights out in Dublin, as opposed to your usual live band. Sometimes when you are sitting on the settee on a Saturday night, you want to go out and get moving, have a few drinks and do something different. If that sounds familiar, this evolution is for you. Keep Reading.

💙setteesounds are always listening💙

Ryan Dwyer’s first encounters with electronic music was around the ages of twelve and thirteen, when he would listen to Robbie G and Bisset, “so the club stuff has always been there.” From there, he got into hiphop, especially the older stuff, around the age of fourteen but “[went back] to the club stuff when you start going out.” Dwyer says that when they started running LooseTooth, they “sort of fell into running a club night, we didn’t plan on that, it just happened after Covid.” There is a presence of Covid within Dwyer’s story on how he started producing and eventually releasing music. Dwyer has no music theory, and says he “was on Garageband, fucking around with loops” when he was sixteen, “I did a course in town, for people in the area, you could go in and play on laptops and shit, it was called Future Creators. I just started messing around with that and then I got a laptop and started making my own stuff after that.” Dwyer mentions Covid was when he started to take production seriously, and started a Music Production course in IADT but switched to the Music and Business course in BIMM, “I don’t want to record the fucking Beatles, I want to make beats!” Dwyer continues on to saying that “meeting Gav (curtisy) was a big one…He text me one day…being like, ‘do you make beats,’ and I was like, ‘yeah’ and from then on, me and him making stuff together which taught me [lots.]”

Dwyer is a producer but alongside that, he has been organising music nights in Dublin since he was in school. From starting with LOOSETOOTHDENTALCLUB to LIPS2EARS, he never really stops. LOOSETOOTH was created when he was sixteen, by himself and his mate from school, Holly. “She had a little tablet for processing graphics on to iPads and stuff like that, and I was sending her stuff and saying, can you get that digitised for me?” Dwyer and Holly would come up with ideas together, she would draw them up and Dwyer would get them screen printed, “and we started selling clothes, basically.” LOOSETOOTH began as a clothing brand but started hosting gigs then, “we accidentally became an events company by pure luck.” Their first gig was meant to be held in the Easter of 2020 but was postponed and reinstated after lockdown. They had an impressive lineup of Curtisy, Ahmed with Love, Rory Sweeney and E, the Artist in the Workmans.  

“Everything I have learned with LOOSETOOTH is what I’m bringing with me into LIPS2EARS.” LIPS2EARS is a multimedia platform Dwyer runs alongside Cian Bolger and Eoin Boyle. The title comes from one of the names of a LOOSETOOTH night that they ran, “I think I had a spoken word or a poem or something that said: ping-pong, lips to ears.” It represents the nature of a gig, “everyone’s talking, and the two main things are like someone is singing and then someone is listening. [It is] music and conversation, they’re the two things they were based off.” They hope to eventually get Arts Council funding, as the demand and popularity for LIPS2EARS grows nationwide, “the idea is to have a multimedia platform, a middle person…As music evolves, you need someone in the music scene to talk about the music scene, someone who really understands it to showcase Irish art.” There is huge emphasis on LIPS2EARS becoming a nationwide arts platform, Dwyer says there needs to be something to “connect the dots between Dublin scenes and Limerick scenes and Galway scenes…someone needs to be writing about it in a way that is on the ground.” He mentions as well that it acts in a way, like a directory, someone can go on to LIPS2EARS and say, “these are the DJs, these are the rappers, these are the singer-songwriters.”

As this is SETTEE @ NIGHT, I asked Dwyer what he thinks of Dublin nightlife, both as a DJ and also as someone who goes out. “After being away in London for the year, I’ve obviously missed the whole wave of [the new] Index, it looks like they are getting really big bookings in, which is really good.” Dwyer talks about the “grace” period after Covid, where people just needed a night out and there was “a bit of everything [on the lineups.] I think now, it’s returned to techno and harder stuff now whereas there was a bit of everything [back after lockdown].” When speaking about being someone who just goes out, Dwyer says that “the three o’clock rule sucks, I think it’s half two now as well. Sometimes if I’m out, places do close early at half two.” The cost of going out too has become astronomical, between taxis and tickets which are usually a minimum of a tenner, and drinks which are working out near seven euro a pint, “I have a mate from Greystones and his taxi home would cost him seventy quid.” Dwyer says that “because of the cost, the scene can’t really thrive. Dublin is a small city and we don’t take advantage of the fact that you could go to an indie gig in Workman’s and then go over to Tengu.” The cost seems to nearly always be the barrier in people’s reluctance to go out. 

D*MP has worked with so many Irish artists, so we asked who he is listening to at the moment. “Stella [and the Dreaming], she has only released three songs in the last few years but her music is just unreal…Anything she releases I’m always shocked by how good it is…It’s harder to keep up that standard, when you release one song that’s really good and you continue doing that.” He also mentions Saoirse Miller, “she sounds like nobody else in the world, I’ve never heard music like it.” When talking about production, “Sella, he’s more techno and garage, he always posts demos on his stories and I’m like, how they fuck did you make this?” Dwyer also lived in London with two Irish producers, “Poser and Rory Reid, they just released a beat tape that is really good.”

D*MP in the Future? What does it hold? “Being away in London for the year was really good for just making stuff instead of releasing stuff…I think I needed to do that to get better. I learned a lot from being in London and being in a gaff with two producers and making shit all the time.” There is a single in the works, and its release will lead to more singles being released in due time but he has some hip-hop tracks to finish up first. “The thing is, hip hop is easy, you can make a beat in ten minutes, but then getting the verse recorded can take…There’s a thing called rapper’s time, where rappers are never on time for anything which is good, because when it comes, it’s brilliant.” Dwyer says as well, it is nice to not have to focus on a genre, hip hop or techno, but instead, focus on the sound. Dwyer is just after finishing college, “it’s the first time in my life where I’m just making music. Trying to focus in a little bit.”

D*MP’s fun fact is that his newest EP, f2f, stands for ‘Files To Feelings,’ as all of the tracks on the EP aren’t mastered or mixed, some have a few effects thrown on them and that is that. “They’re the type of tracks you just can’t finish.” We also saw a pigeon with a white feather on his head, who looked like Rick from Rick and Morty. Take from that what you will.