Mon, 21 Mar 2005
The Celtic Fiddle Festival
A new discovery. They are Kevin Burke (Irish), Johnny Cunningham (Scottish) and Christian Lemaître (Breton), three awe-inspiring fiddlers who play separately and together on their four albums, the first two and fourth of which are live. Traditional and original tunes by all three. I'd love to see them play live and up close - for example, about six minutes into the first track on their first album are some literally light-speed runs! I discovered them in a roundabout way: I was listening to a batch of Enya today while home sick, and included in the playlist was something I has downloaded a while ago called "Enya - Celtic fiddle". Now, I know Enya doesn't play fiddle, but I listened to it anyway, and it was lovely, so I wanted to know what it was.
I went to Musicbrainz to see if they had heard of it. (MusicBrainz is fantastic: you use a little helper app to somehow analyse the sound patterns in an MP3 file; that analysis gets looked up to see what the song actually is, regardless of tagging. It works amazingly well a lot of the time.) It did see it as "Enya - Celtic fiddle" from a mostly-Enya mix CD someone had put together (and stupidly uploaded the analysis), but it also saw it as "Kevin Burke, Johnny Cunningham & Christian Lemaître - The Celtic Fiddle Festival - 02 - Melodie Rondes de Loudeac". I looked up the The Celtic Fiddle Festival and found them at Green Linnet, their label, and had a listen to the streaming RealAudio they have of all their music. Sure enough, MusicBrainz was right, so I now have the file tagged properly. Green Linnet has MP3's of samples and RealAudio of full albums, so thanks to Net Transport I now have a bunch of Celtic Fiddle Festival albums on RealAudio. Link on the button below, since they use one of those awful seach engines that you can't bookmark.
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