Tags: trad

For the past few years, I’ve been taking a trip to Spain at the end of September for the Cáceres Irish Fleadh. Last year I convinced my friends Liam and Monica to come along and they had a great time.

Like me, Liam just loves playing in sessions. Also like me, Liam likes to spend the gloomy short days of January thinking about travelling somewhere …and then playing in sessions there.

I told him I’d put together a list of potential trips for the discerning session hound. I figured I might as well share it here too…

First of all, there are Irish music festivals. Alas, most festivals don’t happen in the sunny climes of Spain. As you’d expect, most of them are in Ireland.

I’m heading to Carlingford at the end of this month for a weekend of Féile na Tána. I haven’t been before but it looks good. There’ll be the usual amalgam of workshops, concerts, and sessions.

Myself and Jessica will fly in to Belfast, then take the train down to Newry and get to Carlingford from there. You could fly into Dublin and get the train up to Dundalk, but the only Gatwick flights to Dublin are Ryan Air, and I’d rather entrust my instrument to EasyJet.

At the end of March we’re heading to Tullamore Trad Fest. That’s another one we haven’t been to before. Again, there’ll be workshops, concerts, and sessions.

Tullamore is just an hour away from Dublin by train and has plenty of accommodation options. We’ve booked into a nice-looking B&B.

There’s no avoiding Ryan Air for this trip and I want to take my good mandolin, so I’ve gone ahead and booked a separate seat for it. I don’t want to take any chances with an airline that actively seeks to elevate misery.

The festival I heartily recommend is Belfast Trad Fest at the end of July. It’s super convenient to get to with EasyJet flights from Gatwick—go to Belfast city airport, which is right downtown.

The festival offers a really good accommodation deal in modern student flats. The workshops are top-notch, and best of all, it has a really well-organised session trail. You can easily play in sessions all afternoon and evening.

This year, for the first time ever, Belfast trad fest is immediately followed by the all-Ireland fleadh, which promises to be pandemonium. I’ve never been to the fleadh before but I’m going to stick around Belfast for it.

You could head to the Willie Clancy Festival in Miltown Malbay at the start of July (the website seems to be having some issues right now). But good luck finding accommodation. The event is so big now that unless you’re camping, there’s not much chance of finding a place to stay. If you make it there though, non-stop sessions await. Non-stop chaos awaits too. That’s part of the deal. Great workshops though!

There are other festivals I haven’t been to but I’ve heard great things about. The Pádraig O’Keeffe Festival in Kerry in October sounds fantastic, especially if you like your polkas and slides. But it’s in Castleisland, which doesn’t have much in the way of accommodation. So unless you’ve got transport, it’s going to be tricky.

There’s a trad fest in Kilkenny in March. I’ve never been but they’ve got a session trail. You’d need to fly into either Dublin or Cork and then get on a bus. Either way, it’s Ryan Air from Gatwick.

I’ve also never been to the Ennis Trad Fest in county Clare in November but I’ve heard good things. Accommodation for the 2026 event is already in short supply though.

But you don’t need a festival to play in sessions. In fact, the kind of sessions you end up in at festivals have a different vibe to the usual sessions, simply because they’re formed of a hodge-podge of visiting players.

There a few spots in Ireland where you’re guaranteed a session pretty much any night of the week.

I love Galway. There are afternoon sessions in Taafe’s and Tigh Cóilí as well as evening sessions in the Crane and other places. You’d need to fly into Dublin and get the train from there. It takes about two hours.

Galway is busy in the summer time and accommodation can be pricy, but if you go off-season you can find some cheaper options.

Ennis has music most nights. There’s a regular bus service between Ennis and Shannon airport that’s nice and quick. You’d need to fly Ryan Air from Gatwick though.

And then there’s Belfast again. Even when the trad fest isn’t happening, Belfast has sessions seven nights a week. Check out the Belfast session guide Instagram account for up-to-date details.

I recommend staying in The Flint, but make sure you ask for a room on the top floor far away from the nightclub if you’re there on a weekend.

So, to recap, here are some festivals to check out:

• Féile na Tána in Carlingford, county Louth in January (I’m going),
• Tullamore Trad Fest in county Offaly in March (I’m going),
• Kilkenny Trad Fest also in March,
• Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy in Miltown Malbay, county Clare in July,
• Belfast Trad Fest at the end of July (I’m going),
• Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann also in Belfast at the start of August (I’m going),
• Cáceres Irish Fleadh in Spain in September (I’m going),
• The Pádraig O’Keeffe festival in Castleisland, county Kerry in October, and
• Ennis Trad Fest in county Clare in November.

And then for year-round session action, you can visit:

• Galway,
• Ennis, and
• Belfast

I really like it when people post their end-of-year music round-up. Colly, Jon, and Naz have all posted about music they listened to in 2025.

I recognise almost none of the albums that they’ve listed. That’s because my musical brain has been almost entirely conquered by Irish traditional music.

2025 was a year filled with music for me. Mostly it was music that I was playing. I think I might’ve spent more time playing music than listening to music this year. I like that ratio.

Brighton has a healthy session scene. Most weeks I get to play in more than one. Even better, I had some great tunes outside of the pub environment, calling around to people’s houses or having them over for a nice cup of tea with some jigs’n’reels.

Most of my travel in 2025 was music-based. The Willie Clancy Summer School in County Clare. Belfast Trad Fest in Northern Ireland. The Cáceres fleadh in Spain. The inaugural Namur Irish Music Festival in Belgium.

There’s nothing better than being in a good session, and I enjoyed some great ones this year. I think my mandolin-playing has benefited from it too.

I also got hold of some albums released in 2025…

The second Copley Street album is, unsurprisingly, excellent.

The second volume of Mná na bPíob is, also unsurprisingly, also excellent.

But I think my favourite album of 2025 is Òran na hEala by Maurice Bradley. Terrific tunes, superb piping, and equally superb fiddle playing.

I’ve been in a session two with Maurice Bradley during previous tradfests in Belfast. I was looking forward to seeing him there again this year to tell him how much I like the album. Alas, he passed away shortly after the album was released. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. A great loss to Irish music.

Oh, I did get one album released in 2025 that isn’t traditional Irish music, and it’s really, really good:

Deep Black Water by Salter Cane.

Okay, that’s cheating because I’m in the band, but honestly, I think the album is genuinely excellent. Every track is a banger, in my somewhat-biased opinion. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think.

My wish for 2026 is that I’ll have plenty of opportunities to play those songs live. In between all the sessions.

Belfast TradFest | Traditional Music Belfast

Belfast TradFest have republished this blog post of mine and I must say, I really like the photo they’ve used—doesn’t my mandolin look lovely!

I was in Nor’n Irelan’ at the end of July for my annual week of Belfast Tradfest.

It was the best one yet. Classes in the morning, sessions all day, and concerts in the evening.

There were also some excellent events at Ulster University during the afternoons—talks, film screenings, interviews and discussions.

If you squint closely at the poster for this year’s event you’ll see my name on there. That’s because one of those afternoon events was me giving a talk about thesession.org.

I’m no stranger to public speaking but this was a very different audience to the usual conferences I speak at. I had to make sure not to get technical. So I talked about the history of the site, the house rules, changes made over time, and pointed out some features that people might’ve missed.

I also made sure not to speak for too long. I had an hour but I kept the presentation to just 25 minutes so that there’d be plenty of time for questions and discussions afterwards.

It went really well. People had lots of questions and ideas.

Some interesting themes emerged from the discussion…

There was no shortage of suggestions for features that were technically possible, but that I’m probably not going to add because of they might clutter up the interface.

Some other people had suggestions for features that were actually already on the site …but implemented in such a subtle way that you could easily miss them.

This highlights an ongoing balancing act I’ve been performing for the site’s two and a half decades of existence. I want to keep improving the site and ensuring that powerful features are available. But I also want to keep the site streamlined and easy to use.

Thinking about it, this is one of the things that sets The Session apart from other tune collections out there. Many of them have great content but it’s not always easy to get to grips with it, at least at first.

Still, I may have gone too far in the other direction with The Session. In trying to avoid cluttering up the interface, I might’ve buried some features a little deep.

Anyway, all of this has been great food for thought. I’m really glad I got to meet so many people who use The Session. It literally wouldn’t exist without them.

Illustrated Talk: The Session.org with Jeremy Keith

I’m giving an afternoon talk during Belfast Tradfest—come along if you’re around!

Join Jeremy Keith for an insightful talk about his pioneering work with TheSession.org—the world’s leading online hub for traditional Irish music. Discover how Jeremy helped build this vibrant digital community that connects musicians, shares tunes, and preserves Ireland’s rich musical heritage. Learn about the challenges and triumphs of creating an online space where thousands of players worldwide can collaborate, learn, and celebrate traditional music together.

For the past couple of years, myself and Jessica have been going to the Belfast Tradfest in the Summer. It’s an excellent event with great workshops, sessions, and concerts. And it helps that Belfast is such a lovely city to spend a week in.

What struck me the first time we were participating in workshops there was the great mix of age ranges. It always warms my heart to see young people getting really into the music.

Then I found out about their bursary sponsorship scheme:

For many young musicians, financial barriers stand in the way of this invaluable experience. Your support can make a real difference by sponsoring a bursary that covers the cost of tuition for a deserving student.

Last year, I decided to forego one month’s worth of donations to The Session—the contributions that help cover the costs of hosting, newsletters, geocoding, and so on. Instead the money went towards bursary sponsorships for Belfast Tradfest.

It was a great success that managed to cover places for quite a few young musicians.

So we’re doing it again.

Normally, I wouldn’t mention the ins-and-outs of TheSession.org over here on adactio.com but I thought you might like to partake in this year’s fund drive:

For the month of April 2025, any donations made to The Session will go towards bursary sponsorships for young musicians to attend workshops at this year’s Belfast Trad Fest:

thesession.org/donate

Maybe you’ve liked something I’ve written here. Maybe you enjoyed Resilient Web Design, the free book I published online. You can also read HTML5 For Web Designers and Going Offline for free now too.

I’ve never asked for any recompense for my online ramblings, but if you’ve ever wanted to drop me some money to thank me for something I’ve put out there, now’s your chance.

Any contribution you make will go towards fostering the next generation of traditional Irish musicians, something that’s very dear to my heart.

Brighton is blessed with plenty of traditional Irish music sessions. You need some kind of almanac to keep track of when they’re on. Some are on once a month. Some are twice a month. Some are every two weeks (which isn’t the same as twice a month, depending on the month).

Sometimes when the stars align just right, you get a whole week of sessions in a row. That’s what happened last week with sessions on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I enjoyed playing my mandolin in each of them. There was even a private party on Saturday night where a bunch of us played tunes for an hour and a half.

There’s nothing quite like playing music with other people. It’s good for the soul.

DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies | Ian Betteridge

This observation seems intuitively obvious in Europe and pearl-clutchingly shocking in America:

What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.

I managed to get out and play in trad sessions for four days straight: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Today I rest. Or rather, I pack.

There won’t be any Irish music sessions in my calendar for at least the next two weeks. There won’t be much of anything in my calendar. I’m about to be incommunicado as I travel to Amerikay on the wide Atlantic ocean.

You might have seen that video that’s been doing the rounds about how cruise ships got so big. I’m not going on a cruise. I’m going on a crossing. That video ends with:

There are over 320 cruise ships sailing around the world right now. But there’s only one ocean liner left. The Queen Mary 2.

That’s going to be my mode of transportation and my home for the next week.

Then I’ll be in New York for a weekend, followed by most of a week lying on St. Augustine beach in Florida.

All of my sparklines are about to flatline for a while: no blog posts, no links, no notes. I won’t have any internet access on board the ship.

Time for me to switch off my work email. I thought about setting up an autoresponder to let people know that I won’t be replying to their email for a few weeks. But then I thought, how is that any different from how I normally respond to email?

I’ve been immersing myself in musical activities recently.

Two weeks ago I was in the studio with Salter Cane. In three days, we managed to record eleven(!) songs! Not bad. We recorded everything live, treating the vocals as guide vocals. We’ve still got some overdubbing to do but we’re very happy with the productivity.

Being in a recording studio for days is intense. It’s an all-consuming activity that leaves you drained. And it’s not just the playing that’s exhausting—listening can be surprisingly hard work.

For those three days, I was pretty much offline.

Then the week after that, I was in Belfast all week for the trad festival. I’ve written up a report over on The Session. It was excellent! But again, it was all-consuming. Classes in the morning and sessions for the rest of the day.

I don’t post anything here in my journal for those two weeks. I didn’t read through my RSS subscriptions. I was quite offline.

I say “quite” offline, because the week after next I’m going to be really offline.

Remember when I took an ocean liner across the Atlantic four years ago? Well, to celebrate a milestone birthday for Jessica we’re going to do it again!

I’m really looking forward to it. And I feel like the recent musical immersions have been like training for the main event in the tournament of being completely cut off from the internet.

Efficiency trades off against resiliency - Made of Bugs

Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).

This is true of software, networks, and organisations.

When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.

Usually an end-of-year music round-up is a list of favourite recordings released in the year. But in 2022 I wasn’t paying very much attention to new releases. I bought a few albums on Bandcamp. They were mostly of—surprise, surprise—traditional Irish music.

Still, I had a very music-filled 2022. Mostly I was playing mandolin in sessions, both here in Brighton and wherever else my travels took me.

These moments were undoubtedly highlights of the year for me.

I’m taking a nice long weekend break after dConstruct on Friday (I will of course have more to say on that—I’m collecting my thoughts still—but it was a wonderful day).

On Saturday I did absolutely nothing. It was just as well really, considering that I may have over-indulged in the pub on Friday evening after dConstruct was done. So a day of lounging around idly playing mandolin was just the ticket.

Yesterday, Sunday, I had one of those perfect leisurely days.

It began with a good bout of lazing about in the morning. Then, as lunchtime approached, Jessica and I went to a nearby pub for a Sunday Roast. In this case it was the Dover Castle. It turned out to be an excellent choice—top notch roasts!

While we were enjoying our lunch, Jessica spotted a poster on the wall for Bark In The Park, a local fun day of dog-centred activities. We were sure it had already happened earlier in Summer, but the poster said it was rescheduled to …yesterday!

So after lunch we went to the park and spent the next few hours in the sunshine, petting very good dogs and enjoying the spectacle of such catgories as “fancy dress”, “best rescue”, and “sausage catching.” We left shortly before the announcement of “best in show”—my money was on Mayhem—so I could nip home, grab my mandolin, and head to The Bugle pub for the weekly 4pm Irish music session.

After two hours of jigs’n’reels, I headed home. The weather was still lovely. The forecast was for cloudy weather, but it was unexpectedly sunny. So I fired up the outdoor grill.

We grilled: one aubergine, halved and scored; one yellow courgette, halved; one green courgette, halved; half a hispe cabbage, quartered. Once they were nicely charred outside and soft within, we ate them with a drizzle of tahini sauce, accompanied by a green salad.

By that time the sun had gone down and it was time for a nice evening spent watching the latest episode of The Rings Of Power and drinking a nice cup of tea.

Like I said, a perfect leisurely day.

I no longer have Covid. I am released from isolation.

Alas, my negative diagnosis came too late for me to make it to UX London. But that’s okay—by the third and final day of the event, everything was running smooth like buttah! Had I shown up, I would’ve just got in the way. The Clearleft crew ran the event like a well-oiled machine.

I am in the coronaclear just in time to go away for a week. My original thinking was this would be my post-UX-London break to rest up for a while, but it turns out I’ve been getting plenty of rest during UX London.

I’m heading to the west coast of Ireland for The Willie Clancy Summer School, a trad music pilgrimage.

Jessica and I last went to Willie Week in 2019. We had a great time and I distinctly remember thinking “I’m definitely coming back next year!”

Well, a global pandemic put paid to that. The event ran online for the past two years. But now that it’s back for real, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

My mandolin and I are bound for Miltown Malbay!

Reinventing W3C Governance

To be honest, I’m not all that convinced by Robin’s arguments here about overhauling the governance model at the World Wide Web Consortium (partly because the way he describes the current model sounds pretty okay to me). But I’m very interested in what he has to say in the broader philosophical sense about using values to solve problems:

A value is worth something if it’s there to help you when the rubber hits the road and starts hydroplaning. Sure, you’ll need a handful of high-level lofty values as reminders, if only because there’s always a vocal guy (it’s always a guy) who thinks it’s just outrageous to put people before profits. But mostly you want Values You Can Use.

That might be the best description I’ve come across yet for design principles: values you can use.

When we say that engineering is about trade-offs, we’re saying that engineers solve their hardest problems using values (which they call “heuristics” because everyone’s entitled to be fancy some). In implementing a system, you might need to decide between an option that provides people with the best experience, another that delivers the greatest value to the shareholders, and yet a third one that makes the control centre blinkenlights dance in the prettiest way.

Playlist J (part 2) – The Irish Mandolin – a website from Aidan Crossey

I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.

• Jenny’s Welcome To Charlie
• Jayne Pomplas
• Jig of Life
• Julia Delaney’s
• Jim Donoghue’s

On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!

Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml

That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.

That’s the version that is two decades old today.

The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.

In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.

What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.

I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.

What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.

I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).

I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.

I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.

The Lords of Midnight

I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.

A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph | Open Culture

I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.

It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.

Do you have a favourite non-personal photograph?

By non-personal, I mean one that isn’t directly related to your life; photographs of family members, friends, travel (remember travel?).

Even discounting those photographs, there’s still a vast pool of candidates. There are all the amazing pictures taken by photojournalists like Lee Miller. There’s all the awe-inspiring wildlife photography out there. Then there are the kind of posters that end up on bedroom walls, like Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss.

One of my favourite photographs of all time has music as its subject matter. No, not Johnny Cash flipping the bird, although I believe this picture to be just as rock’n’roll.

This is a photograph of Séamus Ennis and Jean Ritchie. It was probably taken around 1952 or 1953 by Ritchie’s husband, George Pickow, when Jean Ritchie and Alan Lomax were in Ireland to do field recordings.

I love everything about it.

Séamus Ennis looks genuinely larger than life (which, by all accounts, he was). And just look at the length of those fingers! Meanwhile Jean Ritchie is equally indominatable, just as much as part of the story as the musician she’s there to record.

Both of them have expressions that convey how intent they are on their machines—Ennis’s uilleann pipes and Ritchie’s tape recorder. It’s positively steampunk!

What a perfect snapshot of tradition and technology meeting slap bang in the middle of the twentieth century.

Maybe that’s why I love it so much. One single photograph is filled with so much that’s dear to me—traditional Irish music meets long-term archival preservation.