A Thing Unto Itself: This is How We Fly Launch a New Album

This is How We Fly

A Thing Unto Itself: This is How We Fly Launch a New Album

Fiddle player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and clarinettist Seán Mac Erlaine are two musicians experiencing a busy week. Not only is their group This is How We Fly — which also includes Swedish percussionist Petter Berndalen and percussive dancer Nic Gareiss — performing in Dundalk, Drogheda and Dublin, but the ‘contemporary folk band’ once described in these pages as being ‘potentially paradigm shifting’ is launching a new album. In addition, This is How We Fly will appear as part of the Bottlenote Festival in a series of improvised sets in an atmospheric Georgian building on North Great Georges Street, Dublin. Ó Raghallaigh and Mac Erlaine told The Journal of Music this week about the curious composition of the group, the band’s recording philosophy and performing in the Bottlenote Festival.

Win a pair of tickets to This is How We Fly’s album launch in Dublin, held in the Button Factory, Temple Bar, on Friday, 27 September. Email editor [at] journalofmusic.com with your name and phone number by 3pm today.

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

‘[Our recording philosophy could be described as] high-end DIY, perfectionist at the wheel, capture the magic, treating the music as a thing unto itself, not an audio photograph of a live situation.

‘Music for me is the meeting of the musician, the music, the listener and the space. Each can make room for the other, and when all do that, wonderful things happen. A special space [such as the building where the group will perform on North Great Georges Street] is hugely exciting to me, a beautiful and interesting sonic space to interact with, to feel out, to respond to, listen to.’

Seán Mac Erlaine

‘The four members come from four distinct backgrounds and only two of us come from the same place in the world. In a way, what brings us together is that within each of our areas we have made some decisions not to exactly ‘fit-in’! We have one foot in traditional folk or improvised music but the other foot is in a space called This is How we Fly. Ultimately we aim to make music which is full of personality, our personality and everybody has their own personality.

‘Bottlenote has always been a very open-ended operation. We have worked with a pool of musicians from Dublin and pitched these against our European and American peers, presenting new collaborative music and performances. So it’s a way of bringing people together to make music. The emphasis tends towards improvisation and to presenting music to audiences outside the traditional music venue model.’

thisishowwefly.net
Buy the album here: thisishowwefly.bandcamp.com/

 

Published on 27 September 2013

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