MUCH like A Collection of Songs in the Traditional and Sean-Nós Style, the second instalment in Nyahh Records' Trad Series bears a strikingly descriptive and understated title.
A Collection of Slow Airs By Some Very Fine Fiddlers brings together a collection of Ireland's finest fiddlers, as the name suggests.
It's a natural extension of the first part of the series which featured songs from Thomas McCarthy, Aoife Hammond, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin and individual tracks from Landless bandmates Ruth Clinton and Méabh Meir, all performed a cappella in the sean-nós style.
The newly released album (Artwork by Denise Conroy)The artists recorded their tracks themselves in pubs and homes, inspired by the song collecting of the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax who collected field recordings of traditional music in Ireland in 1951.
Now, it's the fiddlers' turn to self-record on mobile phones, digital recorders or laptops and, appropriately, slow airs take centre stage with these particular types of tunes often coming directly from sean-nós style singing.
With little use of effects, the ten recordings offer traditional music in its most basic yet truest form.
Lankum's Cormac Mac Diarmada - who also performs with Clinton as Poor Creature - opens proceedings with the sanguine Iníon an Fhaoit’ ó’n nGleann, recorded in a living room in Sligo.
A song of love and longing, it is a joyful contemplation that is underpinned with a hint of yearning, setting the tone for what follows.
A Dream of Home is one of the few new tunes on the record.
It was written by Danny Diamond while he was living in his parents’ spare bedroom in rural Donegal shortly before he left Ireland as he was "struggling to make sense of [his] life."
He describes it as "introspective and bittersweet, mourning the passing of time but attempting to savour it too, despite the pain".
You get the sense of that bittersweet attempt to enjoy time passing on the recording, made in his garage in the Longfellow neighbourhood of Minneapolis,
Minnesota on the evening of 28 August 2024, the crickets in the background almost counting the slow air's time.
There are songs of struggle too. Lucia Mac Partlin performs a tender rendition of Sliabh na mBan, an old Tipperary air about the Irish fighting men being slaughtered on the slopes of Sliabh na mBan during the 1798 uprising.
Tipperary features again on Meanwhile, on Ultan O’Brien's Seán Ó Duibhir A’ Ghleanna - the song's inspiration coming from the 17th century when Tipperary resistance fighter Seán Ó Duibhir who had his woodlands cut down by Oliver Cromwell.
It is the most dramatic track on the record as O’Brien fills the air with trills and embellishments.
Meanwhile, in Táimse im’ chodhladh, from a sean-nós song where a Marxist spéirbhean (beautiful woman) comes to the singer in a dream asking them to wake up and take up arms against the invading British occupiers, Sinéad Kennedy's stirring performance, recorded live in Cafe An Taibhdhearc in Galway last year, is more deeply intense offer.
Kennedy eschews the moments of silence found on the rest of the record, as notes blend and bend into one another.
Surprisingly, while there is such a heavy focus on the love of country and place, romantic love is less strongly emphasised. When it does feature though, it is achingly tender.
Founding member of Dervish Martin McGinley’s track Easter Snow seems to recall lost love.
Though associated with the area of Estersnowe, a townland and civil parish in Roscommon, another rumoured basis of the song is that it is about a woman called Esther Snow who Donegal Fiddler John Doherty described as being "a most beautiful lady, with skin as white as the snow" - and six foot one.
McGinley's playing is achingly tender, whatever the source.
Ingrid Lyons rounds off the record fittingly with The Poitín Gathering, a tune composed by 19th-century fiddler John Mhósaí McGinley to describe, in Lyon's words, "a gathering on a dark night in the depths of winter [as] a group of friends sit and chat around the fire, sharing tunes and stories…singing, happy after making a great run of poitín".
And that's what this collection of slow airs feels like - a group of friends sitting around a fire on a dark night, taking turns to play a tune.
A Collection of Slow Airs By Some Very Fine Fiddlers is available on CD, download and streaming here.
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