Ultan O’Brien

Ultan is a fiddle/viola player and composer from County Clare based in Leitrim. Ultan has a background in traditional Irish music and improvised music. He travels and plays as a soloist, in duos with Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin and percussive dancer, Nic Gareiss, and as a member of Slow Moving Clouds, Skipper’s Alley, John Francis Flynn and Neil Ó Loclainn’s Cuar. In 2020, Ultan and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin released an album, Solas an Lae, on the Scottish label Watercolour Music which was awarded Best Folk Album at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards 2021. In 2020 Ultan was named one of the Contemporary Music Centre’s Emerging Composers and has been commissioned to compose a number of works as a result; in 2022, Ultan was commissioned to create a film and score as part of Ulysses Journey 2022. The film was screened in IFI, Dublin; CCI, Paris; SARC, Belfast and Budapest, Hungary, and at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022.