We chat to the Anglo-Irish quartet The Haar about their wonderful new album of traditional Irish songs set to improvised music. Cue major and minor key switching, intuition and creative satisfaction.
We need more music like this; spontaneous, alive and affecting, The Haar, featuring Adam Summerhayes, Cormac Byrne, Murray Grainger and Molly Donnery, will take you on a journey and have you appreciating the purest of life’s pleasures. Wonderful stuff.
Folk Duo The Ciderhouse Rebellion have found a way to collaborate from 50 miles apart – making music synchronised in real-time. Watch them live this evening and every Tuesday at 8.30pm via Facebook to witness just why that connection is so important.
Totally improvised and recorded live in a single take, Adam Summerhayes and Murray Grainger’s “Untold” is work of startling, immediate beauty. It is a rich, durable and mercurial sound that will reward repeated listens.
Listen to Chapter 2 from UNTOLD, a stunningly beautiful track from the debut album from new duo The Ciderhouse Rebellion featuring fiddle player Adam Summerhayes and master accordionist Murray Grainger.
Our Song of the Day comes from Cormac Byrne & Adam Summerhayes with Molly Donnery – a video capturing their first notes together as a trio – a musical meeting. The results are beautiful – an album will follow.
Throughout ‘Natural Selection’, it’s Dodo Street’s absolute mastery of the instruments that shines through. While the virtuosity on display is breath-taking, it is the way that musical expertise is combined with a streak of anarchic fun that makes the album so entertaining.
Stone Soup is currently one of our Featured Albums of the Month, Johnny caught up with Cormac Byrne and Adam Summerhayes in Ibiza at Costa Del Folk to explore their thinking, first when making this album of totally improvised music and then performing parts of it live.
I have believed for a long time that there is magic contained in forms of improvised music that cannot be found in others and this album by Cormac Byrne and Adam Summerhayes certainly backs that theory. Their Stone Soup project is the best thing I have heard so far this year.
