Daniel O’Sullivan

Daniel O’Sullivan is an English musician and composer best known for his involvement in a wide variety of projects, including Grumbling Fur, Guapo, Laniakea, Sunn O))), Miracle and others. It is hard to attribute Daniel to any single genre of music, because his background stretches out wildly, covering the truly adventurous fringes of the avant-garde, crossing genre boundaries, or engaging in sentimental songwriting in his more accessible modes.

He also works under his own name and has recently blown our minds with the superbly trippy and deeply touching long-play Veld, which ended up on our year-end summary. The album excellently merged Eno-ish art rock sensibilities with chamber psych pop and cosmic haziness.

Whether he crafts otherworldly and dense new wave with Miracle, radiophonic proggy folk with Grumbling Fur, emotional galactic ambient operas with Laniakea or elegant downtempo prog with Mothlite, we can always trace his unique approach joining the British psych legacy with psychogeographical sensitivity, esoteric pop forms with sophisticated melodicism.

STM 244 is titled “Null Divinations Of Rotational Energy In Modified Gravity” – this is a very colorful, varied and vivid affair. It is dedicated to the late great Donald McPherson, a New Zealand guitar player whose heartfelt, elevating and stark folk music is magical due to its simplicity and organic, stripped-down emotionalism. Part of this mix retains a similar perceptiveness, albeit manifested in a wide variety of forms.

In the records

Here we have almost an hour and a half of splendor – short tracks or excerpts are woven into a contemplative continuum, taking us through diverse states, lifting us above the mundane or transporting us into “another green world”, Hassell’s fourth world planet, the pastoral quietness of the Tanworth-In-Arden village (where Molly Drake wrote most of her songs and Nick Drake spent his childhood days), the Tuvan mountains (Nadezhda Kuular And The Tuvan State Ensemble Sayani) or South Sulawesi (Grup Bamba Puang).

It is a globe-trotting experience, which evolves into some strange intuition, enabling the listener to unite all these experiences into a coherent whole and discover the multiple links among them. Daniel’s mix has a deep and uplifting mood, yet not without traces of introspective melancholy or solemn reverie. Due to its ethereal nature, colorful dynamics and organic movements, the mix recalls Otto Freundlich’s abstract multilayered painting “Lichtkreise (Kosmischer Regenbogen)”.

+

Daniel O’Sullivan on the mix

Many of the selections here are extrapolated from their context and some are played simultaneously with others. Disparate worlds and archetypes are fused in order to reveal their origin which is ultimately about limitless potential. This mix is dedicated to Donald McPherson, now plucking the strings of the universe.

What a collection can carry

Pan’s “The Mermaid” is an unreleased 1984 demo by Daniel’s uncle Damien’s group. It sits in the same selection as Jon Hassell, Kate Bush, a recording of North American frogs and Donald McPherson’s “Tumbledown”. That entry in the tracklist says a great deal about how personal this contribution is. A family recording belongs in this musical history alongside records that have travelled much further. The dedication to McPherson gives the whole work another purpose: keeping someone’s music within reach of ears that may never have encountered it.

Daniel also tells us that some of these recordings are playing at the same time. The connections are being composed; a list of titles can only describe part of what happens between them. Returning to this mix eight years after we published it, that is what I want to give space to again. A musician can reveal something through the way he listens that a biography or discography will never quite reach. For me, this is one of the reasons to keep building this archive: to preserve those particular ways of hearing, and let them enter somebody else’s life.

Justinas / S13 · 17 September 2026