Fairy Music
Elizabeth Kirwin is editor and founder of FairiesInAmerica.com, a website that’s been live for 18 years.
The Fairy Gothic Ballads (copyright 2014) are the result of a three-year collaboration between Elizabeth Kirwin, a poet and performance artist, and LiamSckhot, a music composer with specialties in percussion and electronic music. Click on the audio links below to listen to podcasts of each ballad. (The fairy gothic ballads are copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without express written permission of the author and composer). Email: info@fairiesinamerica.com.
LIam Sckhot is the composer of The Fairy Gothic Ballads. Liam has a specialty in musical composition, with an emphasis on percussion instruments such as the guitar, the piano (and keyboard) and drums. He utilizes the Handsonic drum to create some of the ethereal sounds that accompany Sea Changeling, The Drover of Shanwalla and Shantytown. Liam is pictured here playing his favorite acoustic guitar.
Mannanlochlee – a fairy king inhabits a gothic castle on the coast and haunts a small village
Moon Tide – a swimmer is abducted by a woman sea fairy
The Lady of Dun Doegin – a woman faery lives in a secret location in Donegal, where she wields her power over life and death
Sea Changeling – a two spirit lands on the shoreline after an afternoon thunderstorm and is taken in by a woman of the village
The Geis Upon My Life – a curse is placed upon a bard while he is camped on the coast one night, just north of Galway Bay
The Drover of Shanwalla – a drover tends a pair of dragons, not sheep, on top of the mythical mountain: Ben Bulbin
Shantytown – the bard enters a shantytown by the sea, where people are pillaging the remains of a shipwreck.
The Fairy Gothic Ballads are copyrighted by LiamSckhot and Elizabeth Kirwin, ©2014. For permission to reproduce this work, in whole or in part, email info@fairiesinamerica.com.
The fairy gothic ballads are based on the life of an 18th Century character, the bard, who lives and travels among the Irish people and records the legends and stories of that time. The bard is trained in the magical arts and poetics.
The Fairy Gothic Ballads were written and recorded in America. The ballads reveal the dualistic relationship between the Irish people and the fairy race. Their mythos is also a reflection of the way they are viewed in America. On one hand the fairies can be elegant and loving and kind. They also have a dark side: where they are cruel and maleficent. Sometimes fairies wield their energies in ways that frighten humankind. Many of the townsfolk and villagers are terrified and fascinated by the incursions the fairies make into the human world. The combination of fear and terror, interspersed with love and luminous powers are part of what makes the fairy race so intriguing and even puzzling to humans.
