The Two Duos Quartet

Before a tiny, rapt audience on Sunday night, these English folk musicians, composers all, barrel-organed out an extraordinary range of English, European and original material. They're an odd mix themselves: Irish-English piano accordionist, Karen Tweed and her musical partner, guitarist Ian Carr; and the other Duo, the French-accented English button-box player, Andy Cutting, and Kent singer/fiddler Chris Wood.

A five-times All-Ireland winner, Tweed kicked off with her own tune, Miss Honoria McNamara (dedicated to her Ballybunion-born mother), a beautiful little air which threatens to break into an Irish dance tune. But more often, they were hunting out the jigger-and-wheeze of English Morris music, with Cutting playing out the bones of the tune, while Wood mused around on complex, drifting fiddle harmonies; and Carr back-sliced in the odd, wrongfooting guitar rhythm. Cutting tore richly into some fat Parisian and French tunes, while Tweed and Carr demonstrated a pellmell set of reels from Shetland, Finland and beyond.

There were times when the rollicking haystack on the full Quartet fanned out in too many musical directions, but there was no denying Cutting's chilled precision on the English tune, Down the Waggon Way, followed by the emotional swoon of Wood's traditional song Sweet Jane, which he sang while harp-plucking two fiddles simultaneously.

Wood layers the most peculiar accents onto arrangements: a pot-pourri of baroque, early-music, bluegrass, even Steve Reichian minimilism. There's also the ever-upward, spiralling cadence of ensemble tunes like Carr's Amberanna, or Wood's I Feel a Smile Coming On. Tweed abandoned herself elegantly in her trong, dreaming style.

The Two Duos quartet plays the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar tonight at 8.30 p.m.