Celebrated writer and Gaelic language advocate Marcas Mac an Tuairneir affirms his position on the vanguard of Gaelic song and song writing with this innovative new body of work.Speactram is the exciting and innovative new album from Marcas Mac an Tuairneir.

The album was released recently on Friday 29 July 2022, this new body of work is a watershed moment for the Gaelic music scene as it revives the Gaelic popular music tradition, bringing it back into the spotlight whilst further introducing LGBTQI+ narratives into the traditional and contemporary Gaelic song canon.

The album aims to bring back the Gaelic popular music tradition of the 1980s, that saw its advent with the likes of the 101 Band and Na Soluis Dhuibh. Both outfits mapped the Gaelic language onto musical sounds being heard on mainstream radio at the time.

Marcas has successfully managed to reintroduce this concept in Speactram by encapsulating the mood of upbeat contemporary sounds into Gaelic song and introducing the genre of GaelPop - a pioneering new genre which sees Gaelic going pop.

The music within Speactram has an unmistakingly urban sound for Gaelic music and Marcas’ aim with this genre is to give an ‘in’ to those who do not comfortably fit the Gaelic paradigm or who come from non-Gaelic speaking and diverse backgrounds – primarily new speakers and young people going through Gaelic-medium Education.

While encapsulating the mood of the contemporary in Gaelic song, Marcas was also determined to address the absence of LGBTQI+ narrative within the Gaelic corpus. Speactram aims to add a gay, genderqueer voice to the language’s musical soundscape and recognise the role that queer people have always played in shaping and influencing the wider cultural scene – continually sitting at the forefront of the musical avant-garde specifically.