This Is How We Fly taking wing on graceful airs

This Is How We Fly, a group that brings a diverse range of skills and experiences together, are out to make honest music.

When the then director of the Dublin Fringe Festival Roise Goan demanded of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh that she wanted him to put together something nobody had ever heard before for the 2010 festival, it was the kind of challenge that might have proved daunting to some. But the gifted fiddle player had already established himself as an open-minded collaborator, particularly through his involvement in trad supergroup The Gloaming. The result was This Is How We Fly, a group that bring a diverse range of skills and experiences together.

On clarinet and electronics, Seán Mac Erlaine arrived to the project with a background in jazz and free improvised music. Swedish drummer Petter Berndalen is an innovative percussionist with roots in folk music. Exuberant American percussive dancer Nic Gareiss blends improvisation with traditional footwork vocabulary.

Ó Raghallaigh says it was the personnel rather than the instrumentation he was drawn towards. “I guess each of them was a unique solo performer with a really strong and individual voice. So, much more about the individuals rather than where they were coming from or the instruments that they played. It was very much the strength and uniqueness of each voice,” he says.

It was only meant to be a once-off but the rapturous response they received compelled them to continue. Says Gareiss: “After the first show we looked at each other and said we have to do something. We want more performances like this.”

Apart from the visual and performative element Gareiss brings to the project, his dancing also adds an extra texture to the palette of sound. As they embarked on recording an album the challenge was to bring that to a purely audio domain.

“There’s no sound without any movement, you know. It’s the movement itself that initiates that sound. So as a dancer, as someone who works in that realm, I like to remind my musician friends of that,” he says with a chuckle.

“Because God knows, even musicians move and dance and that wasn’t captured on the record. Maybe the next project will be a DVD that has no sound, only movement, with all of the musicians dancing including myself.”

Containing a restless energy, their self-titled debut is a record that evokes a strong sense of place and contrasting moods.

“Most of us I think are interested in the idea of ambiguity, so that you can be listening to a lot of different things within the same piece,” Mac Erlaine suggests.

“And the instrumentation probably helps that it’s quite an unusual. Already people don’t have any real expectations of what it might sound like. There’s a strange custom percussion, and a percussive dancer, clarinet, electronics and an unusual hardanger fiddle.

“And the rest is just down to our personalities and just I suppose four guys trying to make honest music that makes sense together.”

Though the name bespeaks a certain bravado it is suggestive of the act and the enjoyment of what they do rather than the destination.

Ó Raghallaigh agrees: “We’re all very clear that it’s something we enjoy very much and we continue to enjoy and something that I can think I can say that all of us would like to have a long lifetime and that we continue to work together throughout the next decade and beyond. So that’s very nice to be clear about that and to know that we’re all equally enthusiastic.”

There’s plenty of fuel in their tanks still.

This Is How We Fly play Grand Social, Dublin, tomorrow night; Triskel Christchurch, Cork, Friday, May 9 and the Baltimore Fiddle Fair on Saturday, May 10.