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Critically acclaimed Irish artist Niamh Regan recently shared her second album ‘Come As You Are’ on vinyl, CD, and digital via Faction Records.

“Come As You Are has Niamh Regan in total control of her artistic faculties and at the top of her game; she will be one to watch in the coming years… this is an album that needs to be heard, a project teeming with quiet intensity and resonance…” 9/10 The Line of Best Fit

“A powerful second album…Come As You Are’ is a delightful album full of delicate vocals, subtle hooks and exquisite instrumentation.” CLASH Magazine

“A beautiful, breathtakingly candid indie folk record of self-acceptance, Niamh Regan’s ‘Come As You Are’ is an intimate, emotionally charged invitation to embrace ourselves for who we are and lean into our light – even when it’s dark outside.” Atwood Magazine

“There’s a touch of Laura Marling in her voice, something of John Martyn in her intonation and Nick Drake in her guitar picking, the influence of everyone from Jeff Tweedy to Josh Ritter in her crafted storytelling…”

8/10 UNCUT Magazine

“…one of the most formidable forces in the Irish indie-folk scene… a pristine record which deals with faltering relationships, self-doubt, and love with exactitude and fearless candour.” 9/10 Hot Press

“There’s hypnotic late-night deep synths, plus a woozy, bespangled hidden track. In all, intelligent and beautifully idiosyncratic” 4/5 Mojo Magazine

“Come As You Are is a brutally authentic work from a songwriter of the highest order.”- KLOF Mag

Critically acclaimed Irish artist Niamh Regan recently shared her second album ‘Come As You Are’ on vinyl, CD, and digital via Faction Records.

NIAMH REGAN

Niamh Regan’s 2020 debut album ‘Hemet’ introduced her as an artist with a gift for crafting folk-tinged songs with a quiet, reflective intensity. The release started to make waves and achieved over 1 million streams on Spotify and led to nominations for both the RTÉ Folk Awards and the Choice Music Prize ‘Album of the Year’. 

Since its release, Niamh has embarked on headline tours from Ireland, to UK, Australia, Spain + more. Pairing this with many festivals and a variety of support opportunities with artist such as CMAT, Villagers, John Grant, SOAK, Patrick Watson, Sam Amidon, Cormac Begley, and Sorcha Richardson.

In between her performances, Niamh began to write her second record in Attica Studios with producer Tommy McLaughlin. She says, ‘I arrived in Donegal to meet Tommy for the first time with a bunch of demos, half-baked ideas and feeling not ready, it was scary. But I’m so glad that I did it that way. Trusted the process and came into the studio with the intention of capturing exactly where I was with it all and Tommy helped me build from there.’ 

And here we are, with the release of that second album, titled ‘Come As You Are’. It’s an album full of acutely observed vulnerabilities and introspection. Its themes are the issues that many of us find loom large in the small hours: questions of self-doubt, uncertainty about your life’s direction, whether relationships are flourishing in the way you’d hoped and determining priorities. 

“A lot of it is about being in your late twenties and kind of realising we’re all running out of time,” she ponders. “I’d have bouts of massive self-belief in the studio, and then in the next breath I would be like, ‘This is the worst piece of music I could have even imagined.’ It was a rollercoaster. But through that I found self-acceptance; this is where I’m at and making peace with that. That’s what the album essentially is, just making peace with where I’m at and being realistic with myself.” 

Niamh’s goal for the record was to achieve a richer, full live band sound, inspired by her love of Julia Jacklin, Caroline Rose, and especially Wilco. While there are moments of intimacy, the songs on ‘Come As You Are’ are far grander in scale and ambition than those on ‘Hemet’: the rousing, string-assisted majesty of ‘Waves’, subtle electro-pop beats dancing at the base of the mix in ‘Nice’, the dreamy Petty-esque melancholic swirl of ‘Blame’, and standout track ‘Music’, which, if not for the expressive feminine elegance of her voice, could feel like a lost classic from Jeff Tweedy and co.

Niamh has a contagious passion for performing live, having recently completed tours of Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, the UK, and supporting CMAT in the EU. Niamh explains the joy of releasing new music for her is performing it to a live audience, “It’s the best feeling and I think I’ll be chasing it for the rest of my life.”

And that’s a feeling that ‘Come As You Are’ will help her tap into. It’s an album which is a confident step forward, full of songs with the spark to come alive on stage and with the immediacy to beckon newcomers into her world.

IE TOUR DATES 2024

16^th July – Galway International Arts Festival (full band)

25^th July – Song Room, Wexford (solo)

20^th July – The Everyman, Cork| The Everyman after Dark: Ye Vagabonds, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Cormac McCarthy, Matthew Berrill and Niamh Regan

26^th July – Donegals (solo)

2^nd August – All Together Now

12^th August – Kilkenny Arts Festival (solo)

17^th August – Electric Picnic (full band)

20^th + 21^st September – Clonakilty International Guitar Festival (solo)

Preston Reed

Internationally recognised as one of the world’s most influential guitarists and a ground-breaking innovator, Preston Reed revolutionised acoustic guitar playing in the 1980’s and 90’s. His invention of integrated percussive guitar playing – an approach that incorporates a live percussive groove on the guitar neck and body with other techniques – continues to captivate audiences and inspire new generations of musicians around the world.

Reed’s evocative compositions – from driving rhythmic grooves to intimate blues to melodic ballads – are as compelling in live performance as his eye-opening guitar techniques. Rock, folk, metal, jazz, funk, country, bluegrass, world music and classical styles all come into play in creating Reed’s signature sonic landscape that tells stories without words.

Since the launch of his first album Acoustic Guitar in 1979,  Preston Reed has released seventeen critically-acclaimed albums of original music and performed on six continents.

He has taught a master class at Berkeley College of Music. Participants in his summer guitar workshops at his home in Scotland have included Ed Sheeran. His live performances, including his 2012 performance at TEDGlobal with Usman Riaz, have had millions of internet views, and his music has received numerous awards and accolades over a career spanning six decades.

“Widely thought of as the world’s most gifted acoustic guitarist” Total Guitar

“Spectacular…the best one-man show this reviewer has seen since Bruce Springsteen…” The Irish Independent

Steve Ryan is a songwriter, guitar player and educator.  A founding member of Giveamanakick and currently of Windings, Steve has also collaborated with the Rusangano Family, Denise Chaila and Naive Ted among many others. Steve is currently Course Director of the MA Songwriting in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick.

An idiosyncratic, challenging and richly lyrical singer/ songwriter, Junior Brother is the pseudonym of Co. Kerry, Ireland singer Ronan Kealy. Chosen as The Irish Times’ Best Irish Act of 2019 and nominated for the 2019 Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year, Junior Brother has built a rabid following thanks to unmissable live shows, and music both excitingly forward-looking and anciently evocative. His strange stories unfold with reckless abandon upon a distinctive guitar and foot tambourine accompaniment, influenced as much by the avant-garde as music from the Middle Ages and his home place in rural Ireland.

In addition to earning a Choice Music Prize nomination, Junior Brother’s trailblazing debut album “Pull The Right Rope”, also saw Kealy garner two nominations at the 2019 RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards, for Best Folk Album and Best Emerging Folk Act. Similarly, vigorous approval from modern-day Irish figureheads such as the Rubberbandits and Cillian Murphy has furthered Junior Brother’s stock, the latter playing Junior Brother several times on his BBC Radio 6 Music Show. Along-side further airplay, his television performances include appearances on RTÉ’s the Tommy Tiernan show, Other Voices and the Choice Music Prize Awards night in Vicar Street.

PRAISE FOR THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE

“Wry songs of anxiety and frustration”
The Guardian ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[An] unfiltered acoustic mix of neuroses, loss of innocence and religious oppression…Truly unforgettable”
Mojo ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Junior Brother’s The Great Irish Famine captures the range of feelings we face when learning our place in an increasingly shaky world built on a foundation of tragedy.”
PopMatters

“More ambitious than his debut, an ambition met”
The Thin Air ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“The songs of ‘The Great Irish Famine’ are from a shaken world, songs that can be both cathartic and comic, personal and universal”
Songlines ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Magnificent…A strange but wonderful trip”
Hot Press ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

John Spillane is a long-time friend of CIGF, playing at almost every edition bar two, as well as spearheading our attempts to break the World Record for the largest ensemble guitar performance in 2009 where 981 guitarists played ‘Óró sé do bheatha abhaile in unison. “It was like a scene from a Disney movie,” — John Spillane

John Spillane is a musician, songwriter, performer, recording artist, storyteller, poet and dreamer. Rooted in people, place and story, his music transports the listener and his live performances captivate audiences around the world.

After his acclaimed release of 100 Snow White Horses in 2021, in October 2022, John will released ‘In Another Light’ a career spanning album recorded live at the Right Here Right Now Festival recorded at Cork Opera House in November 2021.

Gemma Hayes is a much loved and respected Irish singer songwriter. Her debut album, Night On My Side, was released in 2002, for which she won Best Female Artist at the Hot Press Awards and a Mercury Prize nomination. Since then she has released 4 critically acclaimed studio albums and a limited-edition live album. Gemma is constantly in demand for film and television placements – her version of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, recorded for the US TV series Pretty Little Liars, is now close to 19 million streams on Spotify alone.
Gemma is currently working on a new album which she herself describes as deconstructed folk-pop. Gemma will be releasing a song called High and Low at the end of February with her new album coming in September 2023.

Gwenifer Raymond began playing guitar at the age of eight shortly after having been first exposed to punk and grunge. After years of playing around the Welsh valleys in various punk outfits she began listening more to pre-war blues musicians as well as Appalachian folk players, eventually leading into the guitar players of the American Primitive genre.

In 2018 she signed to the American label ‘Tompkins Square’ and released her first album ‘You Never Were Much of a Dancer’ to widespread acclaim. In 2020 her second album ‘Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain’ shifted somewhat from straight Americana and started to take more of a spiritual influence from the landscape of her homeland of Wales. Recalling from her childhood memories of spooky trees, black against the grey sky and breath misting in cold air there is present a style of guitar playing that could be referred to as ‘Welsh Primitive’.

Gwenifer has toured extensively throughout the UK and the Europe and has established herself as one of the leading lights of the scene, and not to be missed under any circumstances.

Molly O’Mahony has spent much of the last decade writing and performing with art-folk group Mongoose. She returned to her home place of west Cork in March of 2020, and against the backdrop of the unfolding pandemic, began work on her first solo collection of songs.

During lockdown, she bounced many ideas off her two musician siblings Matilda and Fiachra and collaborated on arranging a number of covers with them. This period of time and these collaborations greatly informed her own songs, which were recorded over the summer of 2021, and which her siblings played a crucial role in arranging and playing on.

Molly released two of these songs over the latter half of last year, Remember To Be Brave and Brother Blue.

Her debut album is scheduled for October 2022