Exploring musical boundaries of folk, improv and free-jazz, Córas Trio blend tradition with avant-garde ingenuity

Leading lights in a fresh wave of Irish musicians exploring the links between the ancient and the 21st century, Belfast’s Córas Trio are steeped in free improv, electronic music and also the city’s “seisiún” or session scene, in which musicians gather informally to play Irish Traditional Music. 

Comprising Kevin McCullagh (fiddle, electronics), Paddy McKeown (guitar, electronics) and Conor McAuley (drums), the trio explore what it means to be Irish within the context of colonialism and are deeply conscious that Belfast is the historical site of schisms. Their music implicitly addresses that in the way it melds and weaves disparate approaches, this unlikely pairing of roots and avant-garde with such magical élan as to make theirs seem like the most natural coming together in the world. Take “The Roscommon” with its atonal plucking, irregular rhythms, Irish traditional music taken to the outer reaches where the spirits of Schoenberg and Sun Ra play with Seán Ó Riada and Tommie Potts - and feeling entirely at home in those realms. At once earthy and unearthly.