Slow Moving Clouds

Ultan O’Brien is a fiddle/viola player and composer hailing 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 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 series of new 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. Ultan plays a Michiel de Hoog violin thanks to the support of the Music Capital Scheme and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Music Network and The Arts council


Kevin Murphy is a celebrated cellist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and songwriter from Cork Ireland. He is also a founding member of critically acclaimed Irish experimental bands Slow Moving Clouds and Seti The First. He has also released a solo album under the name Blind Stitch entitled The Emperor’s Lung.

He has also featured as a guest musician with many Irish and international artists such as The National, Bon Iver, Jenny Lewis, Lisa Hannigan, Gavin Friday, Rick Danko Seamus Fogarty, Adrian Crowley and Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode. He has also collaborated with Irish traditional and folk musicians such as John Spillane, Cathy Jordan, Phil Callery Cormac Breathnach, and Ger Wolfe in live settings and on recordings. His band Seti The First
co-wrote two songs on The Waterboys 2017 album Out Of All This Blue. He also participates in the People collective spearheaded by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Bryce and Aaron Dessner (The National). This has resulted in collaborations with the above artists and others in festivals across Europe in recent years including the Funkhaus in Berlin 2018 and Sounds from a Safe Harbour Cork in 2017 and 2019.

He has co-composed the score for Michael Keegan Dolan’s Swan Lake/Loch na Heala hailed by the Guardian Newspaper as the second best dance production of the 21st Century. He co-composed the score for feature film Tomato Red (2017) directed by Oscar long listed director Juanita Wilson and The Lodgers, (2018) which featured at the Toronto Film Festival. He has just finished co-composing the score for acclaimed Irish director Kim Bartley’s new feature documentary True Grit released in 2022. He also composed the score for Luke McManus’s North Circular, which was released in December 2022 and won the Grand Prix at the French Documentary festival FIPADOC.


Aki, the nyckelharpist and vocalist for the band is a Dublin-based musician, composer, and visual artist whose constant search for new sounds and musical ideas keeps him exploring and combining different music genres as well as developing new musical instruments. Aki has toured and performed his music in Europe, Russia, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and North America.