GUIDED by what she describes as “the hand of fate” Clare based musician Nuala Kennedy and long time collaborator Eamon O’Leary travelled from a remote village in the Austrian Alps to a tiny Grecian island to create their atmospheric album ‘Hydra’.

The recording is named after the island itself with Nuala describing the experience of recording there as “magical”. Recorded in ‘The Old Carpet Factory’ an eighteenth century mansion, past luminaries of the historic location include Henry Miller, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, Leonard Cohen and his love Marianne Ihlen.

Kennedy and O’Leary, who have worked together for nearly two decades, share a love of performing in remote places and it was during one of those nights that the journey to Hydra first began.

She tells us, “We were in a little village high up in the Alps one night and after the concert we were having a drink in the bar and I got chatting to someone who had a really beautiful looking dog. He was from this Greek island called Hydra and he said, ‘you have probably never heard of it’.

I said ‘actually I have because I know there is a recording studio there’. He said, ‘well that’s my brother’s studio’. This was like a bolt from the heavens, we thought this is fate. This is like the hand of fate.

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