March 2001

Dear Friends,

At last we have the opportunity to write! Somehow the time has flown since New Year as we have been very busy.

The Month of January was mostly spent in Cross studio in Kristiansand, where we continued our work on demos, we now have 16 songs, and are preparing to go into full production this month. This demo proccess is very important to us as it keeps the creative fire going and allows us to experiment with many different ideas. That way we know which songs will eventually work and so allow us to bring them to their full potential during the actual real recording proccess. We plan to keep you all informed as we work our way through the different stages of the recording, we also will take pictures and possibly film some of the sessions.

We hope to finish the recording by late August, so keep a look out on the site for updates!

During the recording session in January, we recieved an invitation to do a special Secret Garden Arr of a track composed by the Korean film composer Mr. Cho Sung Woo. He is a famous Korean composer with 13 box office hit sound tracks to his credit. As we only ever work with our own original music the initial reaction was to say "no", but when we heard his track, which was beautiful, we enthusiasticaly dove into the project!! We completed the initial recording and overall arrangement in Kristiansand and then went to Dublin at the begining of February to record the orchestra and do a final mix. We worked again in Windmill lane studios, one of our favorites with our old friend and engineer Andrew Boland. Mr. Cho and his assistant Diane Hong, with a TV crew came to Dublin for these recordings. It was great for us to meet them for the first time. We were really pleased with the final result and learn that it is to be the main theme of the movie "The Last Present", which will premier in Korea on March 24th.

After that recording session, it was back to serious rehearsing and planning for our Korean tour. We performed 4 concerts; 2 in Pusan and 2 at the Performimg Arts Centre in Seoul (this is one of our favorite venues in the whole world!). The concerts were sold out and yet again we were greeted with so much kindness, friendship , and understanding. The audiences are always wonderful there and its stil amazing for us how much they relate to our music. We invited the Korean artist Jo Kwanwoo to perform with us, as he has just recorded a vocal version of "Songs From A Secret Garden". It was really beautiful to hear his interpretation and we look forward to possibly working again with him soon.

These past few days have been spent recovering and more so for Rolf, who has come down with a bad flue-like infection. Hopefully the rest of this month will be spent between Ireland, Norway and Italy as we begin the first round of recording. Hope you are all well and look forward to giving you a recording update soon.

Love Fionnuala and Rolf

p.s. We hit no. 1 in Korea last month with our "Dreamcatcher" CD!!!