Mark Garry - Notes Gifted to Time

Ships out on or around November 6th, 2026.

*All vinyl copies come with download codes*

Bluestack Records announces Notes Gifted to Time, the second release on the label from contemporary artist and musician Mark Garry. The album brings together Garry's ambient electronic compositions with the haunting vocals of Donegal singer-songwriter Carol Anne McGowan, built upon a text by philosopher and artist Mick O'Hara. The result is seven pieces of quiet, meditative music — ambient electronic landscapes with echoes of experimental folk, composed as spaces for McGowan's voice to inhabit.

The work began with a gift: O'Hara's essay The Crystal Image and the Memory of Mourning, a philosophical reflection written as both men had recently lost a parent. The text considers how the finality of death and grief are intertwined with intimacy, time and the stories of our lives. Garry responded by adapting the writing into song form, gifting the text back as music — the album's title tracing that exchange. Sound and listening have long been central to Garry's practice, and here music becomes what he describes as something "invisible and ephemeral but profoundly felt," existing in our inner and outer worlds at once.

While Garry has previously released four collaborative recordings — Sending Letters to the Sea, A Generous Act, Drift and A Winter Light — often serving as originator, writer, curator or producer, this is the first where all compositions are entirely his own.

Mark Garry is a visual artist and musician whose installations and sonic sculptures have been presented at institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and White Box, New York.

Mick O’Hara is an artist and lecturer in Fine Art and Visual Culture at Technological University Dublin. As an artist he has exhibited both nationally and internationally and his recent artwork focuses on the inherent materiality of objects and their relationship to language. 

Carol Anne McGowan's music, often compared to Lisa Hannigan and Vashti Bunyan, blends traditional Irish folk with spare, modern minimalist arrangements.