“Ki?la have torn up the ruleboo with their wantonly eclectic mix of styles, brilliant!” - Hot Press Magazine
“ Somehow you get the feeling they lit the fuse for the big bang.” - Bono “One of Ireland’s greatest live band’s” - RTÉ Radio 1
“There is something truly transcendent about the music of Ki?la” - Irish Independent
Spanning 5 decades, Dublin octet Kíla have been vanguards of trad-fusion since they began in 1987. Such is the multi faceted nature of their music that they have performed at jazz, rock, Irish and world music festivals in 35 countries on 5 continents; They’ve released 20 CDs, co-composed music for 3 Oscar nominated animation films and wrote Emmy nominated, IFTA and Greison winning scores for the films and documentaries.
Their music while rooted in Traditional Irish has absorbed influences from a multitude of other genres such as
Latin, Reggae, Rock, Classical, Funk, Jazz and World Music in general. They formed in Coláiste Eoin - a school famed for musicians such as Davy Spillane, (Moving Hearts), Liam Ó Maonlaí & Fiachna Ó Braonáin (Hot House Flowers), Cormac Breathnach (Deiseal), Colm Mac Con Iomaire & Dave Odlum (The Frames) etc. On weekends they’d busk in the afternoon and later on perform at art exhibition openings, book launches, political rallies and pub sessions.
Their earliest Ep Groovin’ (1991) and follow up Handel’s Fantasy (1993) demonstrated their gifted musicality as their own melodic compositions danced alongside traditional ones, all accompainied with varying musical styles and contrasting singing styles; Colm’s large voiced romantic delivery and Ronán’s unique percussive chant like style being blended to form a new and cohesive musical unit. By the time they released Mind the Gap (1995) their musical creativity was in full bloom and they could boast that it was the first self-composed album from the Irish Traditional genre. Their follow up Tóg É Go Bog É (1997) attracted much attention and after palying at WOMEX, in Marseilles, the world embraced their unique take on Irish melodic music.
Since then they’ve continued to perform at some of the world’s biggest festivals like the Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland), Sziget Festival (Hungary), Celtic Conections (scotland) Festival de Ortigueira (Spain), Glastonbury, Boomtown, Cambridge Folk Festival (England), Globaltica (Poland), KAMWA (Russia) Edmonton Folk festival (Canada), RWMF (Malaysia), WOMAD (New Zealand, Spain, Sicily, Australia), Milwauke Irish Festival (USA),
During those years they continued to release exciting new material to even greater acclaim Lemoande and Buns (2000), Luna Park (2002), Kíla & Oki (2006), Gambler’s Ballet (2007), Soisín (2010), Suas Síos (2014) along with three live albums. In 2009 they were approached by composer Bruno Coulais to work on Cartoon Saloon’s animated feature The Secret of Kells (2010) which was nominated for an Oscar. This colaboration continued on Cartoon Saloon’s next two films - Song of the Sea (2015) and Wolfwalkers (2020) both of which won multiple awards worldwide and were also nominated for Oscars . Kíla also won an IFTA for their musical score for the Tomás ó Súileabháin’s Arracht (2019) and were nominated for an Emmy for Crossing The Line Films’ Ireland’s Wild River (2018) and the follow on series Wild Ireland won the highly prestigious Grierson Award for rest Natural History Documnetary.
Kíla have played with and collaborated with choirs, quartets, opera singers, samba and african style drummers and Irish luminaries such as U2, Sinéad O’Connor, The Dubliners, Shane McGowan, Glen Hansard & Dónal Lunny. Their most recent collaboration is with Paul Frost’s 8 piece brass band of which they have relesed two singles Raise The Road and Cara Liom and expect to release it by next year.
