The National Concert Hall has announced the line-up for the first of this year’s Tradition Now concert series, taking place in June. The series, which focuses on new sounds in traditional music, will feature six concerts over four days. 

Beginning on Wednesday 15 June, the opening event will feature cellist Eimear Reidy and Leitrim-based musician Natalia Beylis, who together released the atmospheric, experimental recording Whose Woods These Are last year.

The following evening, Daragh Lynch from Lankum and singer and multi-instrumentalist Iona Zajac come together to showcase their solo material, as well as music they collaborated on and recorded last year.

On Saturday 18 June, Rufous Nightjar, which features singers Branwen Kavanagh, Anna Mieke and Zoe Basha, will perform work from their new album which is to be released later this year.

The above concerts will all take place in The Studio at the NCH. The Main Stage event of the festival, on Saturday evening, will feature The Olllam, who in 2012 released their innovative self-titled debut album but they have only occasionally performed live in Ireland since. The band is a collaboration between Belfast uilleann piper John McSherry and three Detroit-based musicians: piper, whistler and Grammy-nominated producer Tyler Duncan, drummer Michael Shimmin, and bassist Joe Dart from the band Vulfpeck. They will be joined by guests Harry Bradley, Dónal O’Connor and Libby McCrohan.

On Sunday afternoon at 3pm, concertina player Pádraig Rynne’s six-piece band Notify will perform in The Studio. Mixing backgrounds in jazz, traditional Irish, avant-garde and folk, the band features fiddle player Tara Breen, Davie Ryan on drums and percussion, Adam Taylor on electric bass, Rory McCarthy on piano and keyboards, and Hugh Dillon on acoustic and electric guitars.

The festival will finish on Sunday night with Ian Lynch of Lankum and an evening titled Fire Draw Near, also the name of his popular podcast. The evening will comprise a live show exploring the outer boundaries of traditional song, ‘bringing us through time, across continents, and into various states of consciousness; a forgotten and strange wilderness that feels as much Alan Moore as Alan Lomax.’

As well as Tradition Now, the NCH have also just announced James Vincent McMorrow’s Imagining Ireland, which features McMorrow, The Scratch, Sorcha Richardson, Aby Coulibaly and Niamh Regan at the Barbican in London in June and is a collaboration with Serious and Culture Ireland; Rufus Wainwright at the NCH on 6 July; and Camerata Ireland with Barry Douglas, Marc Coppey and Dmitry Sitkovetsky at the NCH on 29 May.

For more on Tradition Now, visit www.nch.ie.

Click on the image below to listen to Whose Woods These Are by Eimear Reidy and Natalia Beylis.