Deep End Of The Ford

Deep End of The Ford (DEOTF) combine four of the most progressive avant-garde talents in improvised and folk music with the spoken word of Celtic prehistory; to "create a seemingly ancient sound out of instrumentation that is anything but ancient"

Their retelling of The Táin sees them use the transcribed texts of the 8th century AD to explode a mythological epic, which was formed in the 3rd C. BC, on the modern senses.

DEOTF are an avant-garde improvisatory collective comprised of: Lorcán Mac Mathúna (voice); Seán Mac Erlaine (bass clarinet, saxophone, electronics); Martin Tourish (piano accordion); and Eoghan Neff (fiddle, looping station).

Their interest in Old-Irish mythology and the oral prose tradition of pre-Christian Ireland is synonymous with their development as an improvisatory collective. As Ciarán Carson, the Belfast author who compiled the most recent translation of An Táin, puts it: “Much of the action in the Táin takes place at fords. …There are deep ends to these fords. In Irish mythology streams and rivers are liminal zones between this world and the Otherworld.” Deep End of The Ford delve the depths and currents of this ancient corpus to create evocative music which; like the extraordinary exploits of An Táin, exists on the boundaries of musical form and style.

So far Deep End of The Ford have been commissioned to:
• Write the music for The Táin;
• Write and perform a cycle of songs, Derry to the Sea, to open the largest traditional Irish festival in the world, the Fleadh Cheoil, for the UK city of Culture 2013;
• Write and perform a descriptive piece using Norse and Gaelic accounts of the Battle of Clontarf for its millennium celebration in 2014;
• Write the soundtrack of a BBC documentary of the Fleadh Cheoil 2013.

They are the go-to epic band for mythic interpretation.