Auris

Ireland

As a band we all met as cohorts on the Ulster university music degree, all hailing from distance musical backgrounds. I (Luke) spent most of my life solely as a traditional musician (learning in comhaltas/competing in fleadhs etc) but during covid after trying to pick up some piano I began gaining an interest in other types of music and desperately wanted to understand and play them. This led me into uni hoping to meet as many varied musicians as I could. Michael Mcdowell a sax player from Bangor was one of the first people I managed to befriend, he'd only recently begun sax and had been a classical piano player for the most part until uni. The learning and sharing of ideas that myself and Michael did in those 3 years of uni I believe totally shaped me into the musician I am and I think his interests and style can be heard in my own playing and vice versa. Michael then introduced me to who would make up the rest of the band; Conor(guitar), Cillian(bass), Sean-miguel Murray and Calum Smith(keys) all ferocious musicians in their own right and while we weren't able to mix immediately each of us probably subconsciously were absorbing one another's music, they would come and listen to the local sessions and I joined the University Jazz Band.

It wasn't until final year of uni that I believed I finally I had ideas strong enough to shape into the fusion sound id been trying to find for years this culminated in the performance from the 2 audio tracks I've submitted, a gig in association with the university of totally original music.

Following this we got the chance to perform at the Belfast tradfest, a great opportunity but we had about 5 weeks to come up with a 2hr set list. this boiled down to a lot of 7 hour writing session days taking ideas from every member of the band and while it was tough I was happy with how we performed.

This time-crunch performance however did leave me wanting to really nail down our 'sound' before properly taking the band out again, so, the primary goal of this past year has been to write and rehearse as often as we can and I feel like we've improved so much since our last show.