Cara

The multinational Celtic folk band, which has won two Irish Music Awards and numerous other awards, celebrates its 20th stage anniversary.

In 2003, four close folk musicians joined forces to form CARA (Gaelic: friend) and to this day, friendship plays a central role in the band, in addition to their shared love of the traditional music of Ireland and Scotland.

In the 20 years of their existence, CARA have earned an excellent reputation, often highlighting their innovative arrangements, original compositions and songwriting, as well as their virtuoso performance and charismatic stage presence. They create their own sound, in which the voices of the two singers Gudrun Walther and Kim Edgar are at the center. The vocal arc ranges from dreamy ballads to archaic Gaelic mouth music to their own songs with current socio-political references, with the two lead singers Gudrun Walther and Kim Edgar always complementing each other with somnambulistic certainty. 

The songs alternate with fast-paced instrumental pieces that live from the virtuoso interplay of fiddle and uilleann pipes. The Irish bagpipes, which were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017, are played by Cara newcomer Simon Pfisterer, who studied this extraordinary instrument at the University of Limerick. 

What also makes CARA special are the interaction of guitar and piano and the band's unusual and rhythmically and harmonically rich arrangements. They bear the signature of Jürgen Treyz, guitarist, producer and musical mastermind of the band.