In the Echo: Field Recordings from Earlsfort Terrace

Proof that Irish traditional music is the most amenable of genres, In the Echo brings together leading figures in the form with musicians from other fields to produce one of 2021’s most seductive albums. Released digitally and on vinyl, producer-curator Ross Turner’s eight-track ‘concept compilation’ is as satisfying as it is intelligent, filtering traditional idioms through lo-fi immediacy with the emphasis on the subdued and the introspective, the whole suspended in a soft, hallucinogen-tinged glow. Recorded in the ‘remote pockets and open spaces’ of Dublin’s venerable National Concert Hall, it’s as much an exercise in evoking sonic atmospheres as in describing pensive emotional moods.

Complexity artfully disguised as simplicity, the result startles with its overcast but transforming beauty. Moving from Lisa O’Neill and Colm Mac Con Iomaire’s heart-rending ‘Peggy Gordon’, with plaintive vocals backed by fragile banjo and aching strings, to ‘MCMXIV’, an otherworldly blend of Lisa Hannigan’s crystalline voice and the intricately taut and tender textures of the Crash Ensemble, it casts the most appealing of spells. Saileóg Ní Cheannabháin and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s ‘The Campanile’ is all hesitancy and hushed delicacy, Paul Noonan and Roger Moffatt’s ‘A Tenderness’ a scorching, dyspeptic tale of betrayal, Brigid Mae Power and Adrian Crowley’s ‘Halfway to Andalucia’ is a regretful apologia laced with languid forgivingness. Quietly stunning.