Seamus Egan & Maeve Gilchrist: Into the Ice

An immersive collaboration between Irish music icon Seamus Egan and acclaimed Scots/Irish harper and composer Maeve Gilchrist.

Inspired by the history and mythology of Antarctic exploration, Into The Ice draws from the story of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition, a moment when imagination, science, and human ambition collided at the edge of the known world. Through a shared lens of traditional Celtic music, Egan and Gilchrist reimagine this landscape using a rich palette of instrumentation, electronic sound design, spoken word, and poetry. The result is a deeply evocative work that moves between austerity and beauty, solitude and connection, exploring themes of endurance, camaraderie, and the human impulse to explore the unknown.

Seamus Egan, widely recognized as a founding member of Solas and one of the leading figures in contemporary Irish music, joins Maeve Gilchrist, a groundbreaking harpist known for pushing the boundaries of the instrument in both traditional and experimental contexts. Together, they create a sonic environment that is both rooted and expansive, intimate and cinematic.