Inni-K photographed last year for the Other Voices TV series. Photograph: Don McMonagle.

What’s this? A (kind o’) first (type o’) album from a (sort o’) new artist? Inni-K’s EP, called Gentle Star, has four brand new, very personal songs on it, the promotional video for one of which, ‘Gentle Star’, has attracted over 77,000 views since it was uploaded to YouTube in October last year. The titles of the other tracks are ‘Find Your Beat’, ‘D.N.A’ and ‘Precipitate’.

On this CD, Inni-K sings, plays piano, fiddle, ukulele and glockenspiel, as well as ‘body percussion and kitchen bits & bobs’. Recorded and mixed by Jason Boshoff (who also worked on Lisa Hannigan’s Sea Sew), it marks a deliberate shift for Eithne Ní Catháin into song writing, performing her own material, and generally more modern musical forms.

Ní Catháin’s album, Eithne, from 2007, featured her celebrated song ‘What’s in the Bag, Love?’ which clearly established her songwriting abilities, but which felt isolated among mostly traditional material (including sean-nós songs and fiddle tunes) and folk standards (Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ and Hazel Dickens’ ‘Pretty Bird’). The Inni-K identity will enable her to keep her traditional music work (– she is about to go on tour again with Fabulous Beast’s Liam Ó Maonlaí collaboration, Rian) separate from her writing and solo performing.

Having recently played Dublin’s first Camden Crawl and at Vantastival 2012, Inni-K’s next performance will be an in-store lunchtime concert starting at 1pm on Friday, 8 June at Tower Records, where the EP itself can be purchased. It is also available to download on iTunes (http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/gentle-star-ep-ep/id528533376) and CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/innik)

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