The Goo 1
Interview Words: Alannah Nic an tSionnaigh INNI-K
Irish folk music keeps moving. It carries brón. It carries áthas. It takes silence and makes sound. Like the dúlra that surrounds us, it is rooted and restless at once, carrying deep tradition but refusing to stay fixed in one place. Still A Day, the new album from Inni-K, Eithne Ní Chatháin, released on 26th of September holds all of this. It is an album alive with instinct, filled with fidil, voice, and rhythm, where sean-nós phrasing sits side by side with synths and clarinet sighs. Cosúil leis an nádúr féin, tá sé fréamhaithe agus ag fás ag an am céanna. Nature and the living world shape much of the album. The track ‘Beatha’ began,unexpectedly, with compost. “We had an expert come in on composting, ” Ní Chatháin explains. “I was really mesmerised by the dark humus, the 16 various matter transforming over time into this incredible nourishing compound. That’s really what’s behind it is just that living, you know, striving for living, wildlife and the invisible wisdom that’s behind everything.” Her words capture something essential: music, like soil, breaks down what is old or fallen and turns it into nourishment, into something that can grow again. Listening to ‘Beatha’, you hear this instinct: vocals layered like moss, fidil restless and fiáin, a rhythm that feels more like roots pushing through talamh than notes arranged on a page. “To me, the song has little features in it, almost like little insects and things just alive,” she adds. “That’s really what’s behind it. Living, striving for life.” Beatha brims with exuberance, earthy and alive. And while it is not sean-nós in strict structure, the spiorad of sean-nós is there in the phrasing and poise. It carries the echo of old songs, of voices shaped by memory, even as synths and subtle programming stretch the sound outward. This balance runs through Still A Day. It is at once ancient and new, both daring and deeply rooted. This duality, an ceangal idir brón agus áthas, is at the centre of folk tradition, and it is where Inni-K thrives. The fidil is her second voice, threading through the whole album. “I think on previous albums I would have, like, played, you know, notes and played arrangements on the fiddle. But now it’s more like just that fiddling, that gutsy fiddling that I play. It’s like, I kind of leaned into that a bit more.’ Speaking on the song