Pictured here is Emilyn standing under a gigantic banner with a picture of Léon Peyrat at a folk dance event in France called Nuit de la Bourrée en Limousin. Léon was a farmer whose extensive repertoire of great fiddle tunes (mostly bourrées) was collected in the 70s and 80s in central France as part of a wider movement at the time to discover and preserve traditional musics. We started noticing in the liner notes of various modern day trad recordings from France that many of our favourite tunes came from his repertoire. So as a project in 2020 Emilyn learned all of the Peyrat tunes she could find on the internet. Thanks to the folks who've done the work on documenting and presenting traditional music in France (such as the CRMTL) there are many available resources online for this so she was able to learn the bulk of his tunes from over here in Canada. 

Peyrat's tunes remain close to the heart for us, as do the tunes from the repertoire of other musicians collected in Limousin. We decided to record an album of some of this vibrant repertoire, rendered simply on clarinet and fiddle. Some of these tunes we learned from the online collectages, some from jam sessions and meetings with musicians in Limousin (merci :) ). Bourrées, Scottishes, Mazurkas, Polkas, Waltzes that are so fun to dance to and that we love to play together.

Iris was recorded when Emilyn was 8 months pregnant. Then we revisited the recordings to work on the mixes etc. when our boy was in his very early months; day by day watching the focus fade into his eyes. This is the repertoire of a living tradition of dance and music, of bygone fiddlers and farmers, and a repertoire that has taken on a new significance for us, marking this particular place and time of our lives in Ontario Canada.