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!! This page is purely for NEW Celtic Styled CDs !!
For Information and Links to the Artists and their CDs click on the CD cover.
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![Released July 2024.
We are The Next Generation.
We are Étáin and Máire Ní Churraoin also known as An Chéad Ghlúin Eile
We are sisters, native Irish speakers and Sean-Nós Irish traditional singers.
We were born and raised, immersed in music, in the Ráth Chairn Gaeltacht in County Meath after our grandparents [on our dad’s side] rocked up from Conamara in 1935 and 1937. Fun Fact: Mam’s side of the fam, from West Cork’s Castletownbere, were known as “The Singing O’Sullivans”!
Throughout our childhood, the affectionate question was often asked at home, “Cá’il an Bheirt?” [Where are the two?] when we’d be hiding, upstairs, or out in the garden, singing away together!
This question is now asked more often than ever as we perform on stages all over Ireland and the world!
We grew up learning songs orally from fabulous local singers and fellow Gaeltacht singers in our CD collection! We’re the next link in the chain of these songs! We always took great pride in our granduncle’s CD, Darach Ó Catháin! We’ve been listening to him and learning from him the longest!
We dreamt for the longest time of releasing our own album, like Darach, and FINALLY, here it is.
https://www.ancheadghluineile.com/
(their Web page is being updated - available in roughly 2-3 days)
https://www.facebook.com/theSingingSistersss
You can find their Album on Bandcamp.
https://acge.bandcamp.com/album/c-il-an-bheirt](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/844de3_0af7b5a6b8824d228a73b2292278912f~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_700,h_700,fp_0.52_0.47,q_90/844de3_0af7b5a6b8824d228a73b2292278912f~mv2.webp)
![Released June 2024.
Landless are Ruth Clinton, Meabh Meir, Sinead Lynch and Lily Power. They sing unaccompanied traditional songs from Irish, Scottish, English and American traditions in close four part harmony. Their repertoire features songs of love, death and lamentation, as well as work songs, shape-note hymns and more recently penned folk songs. Landless have performed in a variety of settings, both in Ireland and abroad, and are closely involved with traditional singing sessions in Dublin and Belfast.
"The four members of Landless had known each other through various sessions, Clinton explains, before they came together for a traditional singing performance at a festival in Drogheda. “We didn’t necessarily have ambitions to record or perform or anything, but it was kind of organic,” Meabh says of the group’s development.
They have now released their second album, Lúireach (meaning Breastplate or Hymn for Protection), their first with Glitterbeat. It is themed around new and traditional songs which tell women’s stories. “We’re in our Brigid’s era for sure,” says Power, citing the Irish saint, symbol of feminism and patron of healers and poets.
Landless’ first two releases – 2014’s self-titled EP and 2018’s debut album Bleaching Bones – were completely a capella, but Lúireach sees them bring in instrumentation. “[We] had been incorporating pipe organ [live] because I’m an organist,” Clinton recollects, “we’d get invited to sing in churches a fair bit because it suits the sound, so if there was an organ in the room, we’d make use of it. So that part was already present, we just hadn’t recorded it. [Méabh] was saying that with our previous album we recorded in churches and particularly reverberant rooms, so that was the fore… This time around, we wanted a bit of a closer vocal thing. So, we were doing it in the studio and then it made sense to add a bit of instrumentation. And I suppose because we’ve got access to these great musicians as well, like [Lankum’s] Cormac [MacDiamarda] and Alex [Borwick], who were willing to contribute to it.” They are keen to acknowledge, too, the work of longstanding manager Vincent Dermody and producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Lankum, ØXN), who also produced Bleaching Bones, in this new work.
The instrumentation is well arranged, with restraint. Traditional song ‘The Grey Selkie of Skerry’ features long single chords and notes from Clinton’s pump organ, just when the tragic denouement is reached, lifting feeling at the right moment. ‘The Fisherman’s Wife’, written by Ewan MacColl and recorded with Peggy Seeger’s permission, describes a woman left behind on land, her work unacknowledged by her fisherman husband and community. An eerie, staccato piano note persists behind first a single, lonely voice, and then all four voices, powerfully coming together.
There are also songs that remain purely vocal – listen out for the lilting ‘Blackwaterside’, an unusual version learnt from Traveller Paddy Doran. The chorus, with its alternating rhythms, is magic. Throughout Lúireach, the audible contrasts between each voice in Landless are striking. Especially as these different timbres and deliveries create harmonies that ring. “We don’t spend time trying to sound the same as each other,” says Clinton. “I know other vocal groups will really work on having the same pronunciation and everything like that, whereas we kind of, we have our own accents… when we’re using ornamentation in our singing, we’ll all do that freely as it comes to each of us. We’d never get into the weeds of making sure we all sing like just one voice. I don’t think we’ve ever been interested in doing that.”
Lúireach’s closing track, ‘Ej Husári’, is particularly interesting as the album’s only non-Irish song. “We’ve gone over to Slovakia a couple of times, to this festival in the Tatras Mountains, and we’ve done the singing workshops there, and their vocal style is so different to ours,” explains Clinton, “It’s very strident, you know, belty… and this song, which they taught us at the time but also comes from an archival recording… it’s closer to our own style of singing… we performed it while we were over there and I think the people were kind of like, ‘huh!’, bemused by it because we sort of Irish-ified it.” Lynch adds, “it’s actually a song about a woman who’s desperately looking for her lover, her tsar, who’s been killed. But it sounds very lullaby-ish… It’s really beautiful. And it’s nice to try and sing in a different language.” It starts off almost as a hymn – with a single, high, soft voice before, as Lynch notes, the voices disperse into a calming, lullaby-esque croon, with support from a shruti box and MacDiarmada’s strings. A soothing end to an album of songs that, as Lynch puts it, Landless have “live[d] with” before setting to record."
(Emma Rycroft - Songlines)
https://www.facebook.com/landlessmusic
You can find their Album on Bandcamp and Spotify.
https://landless.bandcamp.com/album/l-ireach
https://open.spotify.com/album/7b4OyZHLcf3VqjGUHBtQbo](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/844de3_c3b3b17dea2e4eb4b753c425e1649747~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_701,h_697,q_90/844de3_c3b3b17dea2e4eb4b753c425e1649747~mv2.webp)
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