Reaching For The Tradscendental

Heading to The Whale on Friday, January 24th, megaTRAD chart their road to electric diddley-aye.

I don’t know if there was ever going to be a different path for us.

Though we deviated away from careers solely in music at times, those roads always came to an end or brought us back to where we were going originally.

Brothers Cillian and Seán O’ Dálaigh were both brought up in a family of musicians and dancers so inevitably it was always going to be part of their lives. Though Denis was the only musician in his household it was always something that was in his blood as it came so naturally to him. Having worked in many other jobs throughout the years he was never content until he realised that his efforts were misdirected and his pursuit of happiness lay in playing music for others to experience.

The story of mega.TRAD began as an experiment for a local gig at The Glen Tavern in Limerick.

The idea, initially proposed by Cillian, was that we bring any effects pedals we have and play a ‘trad session’ plugged in, utilising various effects to explore the nuances of Irish traditional music in a new way, while holding onto a huge premise of what we all love from traditional music that is, listening to and playing with the other musicians. This improvisatory approach to a trad session is what we still hold onto today and is what makes it so enjoyable for us to perform.

Though we never really know what’s going to happen on stage, we know we can trust each other to simply listen and bounce off each others ideas. An approach we often lean on is that there are no wrong answers in a megaTRAD gig. If you have an idea go for it!

I think for us, something that always draws us back to music, and sticking with it through thick and thin, is that we can continue to explore ideas and express ourselves, and to be able to do this for our work is incredible really.

You can grab your ticket for megaTRAD at The Whale on Friday, January 24th right here: https://whaletheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873650938