Released September 30, 2021
All the music on the album depicts, celebrates, or mourns for those who are in life-altering transit: vagabonds of all sorts, migrants, refugees, those newly born, those departing this life.
" A keystone album for our time"
Seán Laffey, Irish Music Magazine
An intimate album from Marla of mostly solo and duo interpretations of Irish and original music on mandolin and mandola, with brilliant guest performances from Martin Hayes, Keith Murphy, Steve Baughman, Bruce Victor and Rebecca Richman, beautifully mixed and mastered by Sean Keegan. The cover art is a painting by the astounding Vincent Crotty.
THE TRACKS...
1 The Humours of Derrycrossane / Maud Millar / Eddie Duffy’s Favourite slip jig / reels
2 Cá Bhfuil An Solas (Peadar O’Riada) / Winnie Hayes / Càit The Great (Fibish) jigs / slip jig
3 The Quiet Glen - An Gleann Ciúin (Tommy Peoples) air
4 Riversmoke song
5 Ard Aoibhinn (Tim Tully) / The Hunter’s Purse reels
6 The High Caul Cap / Ray’s Classic / The Continental march / polkas
7 The First Rain (Fibish) / An Chóisir / Tommy Peoples’ slip jig / slide / reel
8 Ashes of Paradise (Fibish) waltz
9 Are you Digging on my Grave? song
10 An Buachaill Dreóite / Scully Casey’s / Jackie Small’s jigs
11 The Bright Hollow Fog air
Reviews
"There’s a sparkling brightness to the plucked double courses of strings of the mandolin, and a slightly darker tone to the lower-tuned mandola. The timbres are perfect for expressing both the melancholy and the hope built into the melodies of the instrumental tunes here...The mostly traditional music hits just the right emotional notes to offer much needed solace and comfort—and a feeling of intimacy—in these fraught times of distance and isolation. It's the sonic equivalent of a lace curtain wafting in a window, sunlight dappling a polished hardwood floor."
-Derk Richardson, Peghead Nation Full Review
What a thrill this record is to me. To sit back and soak in the glory as Marla Fibish makes her mandolin sing the good old jigs and reels… it’s just magical."
-Stuart Mason, Fiddlefreak.com Full Review
All CDs are $15 plus $5 for shipping within the US for up to 3 CDs. We have favorable flat rate shipping rates for Ireland, the UK and EU countries. For more info, please visit our store, or email us at (noctambulemusic@gmail.com) to place an order, or to inquire about overseas shipping.
Additionally, all are available for purchase/download/streaming via Amazon, iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify and all the usual outlets.
A Sweetish Tune Released 2017
We bring you a different sort of offering this time - Irish traditional music, mixed with a few newer compositions in traditional forms, by others and by us. Our interpretations feature the tones and textures of our instruments in various conversations and combinations. Making the album turned out to be a wonderful journey of discovery, balancing personal blends of melodic exposition and harmonic frameworks, while hoping always to honor the tradition. Our project also includes a few songs - a traditional ballad, a new ballad based on a true and tragic story by a contemporary Canadian songwriter, and a Khalil Gibran poem that we set to music. We hope you enjoy it.
THE TRACKS...
1 Paddy Canny’s Toast (C. Lennon) / The Tempest
2 Bold Doherty / Bill Harte’s Jig
3 The Creel /The Sweetheart Reel
4 Trip to Skye (J. Whelan - BMI) / The Good Doctor (M. Fibish)
5 Blind Mary (O’Carolan) / Cold MIssouri Waters (J. Keelaghan)
6 The Cloone / March Reel (M. Fibish) / The Abbey
7 Mr O'Connor (O’Carolan) / The Broken Pledge
8 Song of the Wave
9 A Sweetish Tune (M. Fibish & B. Victor)
Reviews
"There’s an old saying about couples making beautiful music together, metaphorically speaking. In the case of Noctambule, it’s more than a figure of speech."
- Paul Liberatore, Marin Independent Journal Full Review
"...One line sums up Bruce and Marla's sound -- 'We blend in melted brilliance."
- Clive Price, Irish Music Magazine Full Review
"A must-have album from a must-follow musical couple."
- Patrick O'Heffernan, Music Junkie Press Full Review
"...an unhurried, low-key quality to it, but also an understated intensity and purposefulness -- a different sort of listening experience for many Irish Music aficianados, but a worthwhile one."
- Sean Smith, Boston Irish Reporter Full Review
THE WAKING, which has been in the works for about a year, is mostly poetry-to-music again, with a couple of original tunes thrown in for good measure.
While we did not set out to write a ‘theme’ album in the same way as we did our first album, it wound up being one, ne’ertheless. It is entitled THE WAKING (from Theodore Roethke’s poem of the same name...which we put to music...on a dare...but that's another story). The poems that we selected for this album address the vicissitudes, the inscrutability, and the ultimately indomitable nature of time. And, but for Roethke, it’s a whole different crowd of poets this time: W.H. Auden, Stephen Vincent Benét, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Jenny Joseph. The offerings range in tone from direly sombre to provocatively giddy; the offerings include a waltz, a slow air, many of our usual tough-to-categorize songs, and one that could even get filed under R&B. There is the usual panoply of voices and instruments: mandolin, mandola, Greek bouzouki, accordion, cittern, tenor guitar, and the usual array of 6, 10, and 12 string guitars in various tunings and stringing sequences. And there are some new additions as well -- whistles, flutes, violin, viola and cello -- courtesy of a few very special guests.
"Just occasionally in music, something comes along that just works and when it does it works to perfection, Noctambule is just that."
-- Tim Carroll, Folkwords Full review
"...poetry set magnificently to original music...exquisite excursions into daydream worlds...like taking a tour of a dozen regions of the land of the human soul...induces a trance of the most luxurious kind."
-- Kevin Carr, Folkworks Full review
"The sheer quality of the musicianship on their vintage stringed instruments is a rare and beautiful thing."
- Paul Liberatore, Marin IJ Full review
The Waking Released 2015
THE TRACKS...
1. Bastardo's Waltz
2. The Waking
3. Mad Girl's Love Song
4. If I Could Tell You
5. Sally Dupre
6. Since I Was Begotten
7. Out of Time
8. September
9. Warning
10. Bastardo Returns
Travel in the Shadows Released 2013
Our Album is about night journeys -- but if the night is its usual metaphor, then this project is really about the process of attempting to get from one place to another, from here to there without the usual, obvious and dependable sources of light. It means we must use other guideposts t0 re-orient ourselves. There is the implicit necessity to put our faith both in ourselves as well as in unseen forces and hands, given the absence of the usual progress markers. Destinations can become elusive, unexpected or nonexistent. At the end of the day (so to speak), it is about the journey and how we conduct ourselves through it.
The absence of the obvious sources of light will stimulate or unleash any number of emotional states: exhilaration, loneliness, love, and especially shifting degrees of trepidation, anxiety, and terror. Sadness is de rigueur for many reasons, none of which will be elaborated upon here. Perhaps the idea is to shift our perspective from looking at these states not merely as reactions to the journey, but also as one's assigned traveling companions.
The songs that we have selected seem to be about solo journeys. The night journey is a mucky trek through the marshes of one's own soul, with the annoying squishy sounds of one's own faltering boots as the principal soundtrack. The sense of isolation certainly darkens the shade of the darkness. But perhaps the journey resolves once we make a peace with loneliness, and in so doing, find new sources of connectedness. It is a journey that we all make alone together.
And getting our Night Journey Program under way, we start with Insomnia, untethering ourselves from our usual biological rhythms so that we can be more facilely hurled into The Night. But with any modicum of luck we return (con) Recuerdo, and like the inadvertent singing passengers, we are very tired but very merry, having emerged from waters that otherwise might have engulfed us. We return to the safety and familiarity of the ground from which we left; but it is more sacred ground for having made the Night Journey...
THE TRACKS...
1) Insomnia
2) Noctambule
3) Madam I'm a Darlin'
4) Travel in the Shadows
5) Waltz for Danae
6) The Bohemian Dreams
7) A Suddenness of Trees
8) Lost
9) Captain Chalupa
10) The Sisters
11) The Bohemian Dreams (les reves continuent)
12) Recuerdo
Praise for Travel in the Shadows...
'The irregular phrases, unpredictable meters and strangely beautiful harmonies...overlapping voices, guitars, and mandolins conjure a nocturnal world in which the words of some of our finest poets take shape and snap together magically like recently discovered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Travel in the Shadows is folk music at its best--hand made, without a template.' - Alex DeGrassi
"The arrangements have the kind of genius that reflects lives lived fully, souls not unscathed, but with glittering musical imaginations grounded in joyful glorious experience. The playing is simply beautiful, and the interplay between Bruce's moving, deft yet muscular guitar playing and Marla's always magic mandolin reminds me of watching two strong dancers moving together, creating so much more than the sum of the parts." - Kevin Carr, Folkworks
'..deeply moved and impressed! Ambitious and evocative theme, wonderfully chosen texts, beautiful and intricate arrangements, and highly polished performances, both musically and sonically.'
-Neal Stulberg, Music Dept Chair & Director of Orchestral Studies, UCLA
'So listen again, and again, and in time, in short order, in fact, Travel In the Shadows will cast a certain spell you’ll be anxious to revisit...' - Deep Roots Magazine
"...a superb album that deftly presents well-played, spare but beautiful musical arrangements of heartbreaking, classic American and other poems sung tenderly without guile or false sentimentality, all wrapped lovingly around the theme of the night and how it has influenced and informed many poets over time. It has many layers, and you will not hear or realize them all with only one listen. It is new music played elegantly.' - Anonymous online purchaser