Trad meets pop for Footura

TRADITIONAL music will meet pop in a new album currently being recorded in Ennis by the group Footura.
The group has two Clare members, Padraig Rynne from Caherea and Karol Lynch from Newmarket-on-Fergus, and they will be playing at Dolan’s in Limerick on November 24.
Padraig plays the concertina, while Karol is on the bouzouki. The other two members, Tyler Duncan and Mike Shimmin, are from the US.
The Atlantic is a formidable barrier to musical collaboration but Padraig says they have been able to cope with the distance. “Basically we’ve been friends from going to the All-Ireland fleadhs as teenagers and we’ve been keeping in contact over the internet since then. We recorded half an album through the internet, by emailing back and forth.
“We’re doing one tour, going to the William Kennedy Piping Festival, which is fairly well known. We’re doing the Harcourt sessions in Dublin and teaching in UL for a couple of days and then doing Dolan’s.”
The music they are recording will be rather interesting, he feels. “It’s a mixture of Irish music and pop. I think that’s the best way of putting it. Tyler would have played with a pop band, who would have supported Lady Gaga and people like that. There’s a lot of that type of background music, drums, guitar, bouzouki, a lot of computer music in it and Irish melody with uileann pipes and concertina.”
A lot of work is going into their first album. “We’re getting there, it’s complicated but we’re getting there. We’ve all worked in recording studios over the years, that’s not the hard part, it’s perfecting what we want to do,” he concluded.