Our only soloist at 12 Points this year, Ena Brennan, aka Dowry fuses a variety of different sound worlds together; experimental folk, ambient improvisation, contemporary classical, and Irish traditional music. Dowry’s music is entirely improvised, based on sketches and fragments of melodies, employing loops to create textures and build musical strata of sound layers in her unique sonic landscapes. With a single violin, the music evolves, sometimes slowly, other times spontaneously, with melody lines over looped drones, major to minor, the sound-world developing slowly into dense and sometimes cacophonous but controlled crescendos. As a solo artist, Dowry has absolute freedom to take the music in any direction and, despite her use of technology to augment her presence, the music retains an organic lyrical quality. Her unconventional and compelling approach to an instrument closely associated with Ireland and our fiddle tradition and the resultant music she creates has not gone unnoticed. Dowry has been singled out as 'one to watch’ by numerous Irish media outlets (The Thin Air, State.ie) due, in no small part, to her contemporization of this instrument, but equally, her unusual distillation of disparate genres that puts her music and its implications for the instrument in sharp and uncompromising relief.

Performing at 12 Points on Friday night at 8:00pm
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