From Ireland via the UK comes an inventive and exciting group, featuring melodically dazzling flutes over a hard-driving rhythm section of guitar and bodhran. Their current release, Rubai, has been greeted with critical acclaim, including a nomination for the prestigious BBC Folk awards.

Flook is a quartet of two Irish and two British master musicians who come together to create what The Scotsman calls “one of the most enthralling sounds around.” Rubai is the group's first US release, and its title alone signals that Flook’s worldview is different. “Rubai” is a form of Persian poetry, a reference all the more striking for a band that records only instrumentals. The group’s lineup is unusual as well, especially the double flutes in front.

Flook has toured extensively in the US, Europe, Japan and Australia and headlined Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival in Adelaide. In the UK, Rubai was recently nominated as Best Album in the BBC Folk Awards, and was also included in the top 15 albums as awarded by fRoots Critics Poll 2002. The group won “Best Festival Gig” at Belfast’s Open House Festival in October 2002.

Flook’s current incarnation -- Sarah Allen on flutes and accordion, Brian Finnegan on flutes and whistles, John Joe Kelly on bodhran and mandolin and Ed Boyd on guitar and bouzouki -- has been together for five years. The group actually began much earlier, with Sarah and Brian joined by Michael McGoldrick in the highly regarded Three Nations Flutes. Ed was drafted in early on. When Michael went on to other projects, the band replaced him with bodhran maestro John Joe. The result is musically astonishing.

Individual musical credits are here in abundance. It would do to mention Armagh’s Brian Finnegan’s four All-Ireland Championships on flute and tin whistle. Or Manchester’s John Joe Kelly’s amazing eight All-Ireland wins on bodhran (6) and drums (2). Londoner Sarah Allen toured the world for 5 years with the immensely popular The Barely Works. And ever since he moved from his native Bath to Manchester and discovered Irish music, Ed Boyd has been renowned as a guitar accompanist of great taste and subtlety.

With this powerful group, the traditional musical form will never be quite the same. This is different and wonderful.

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Flook live in Cornwall, Ontario

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