The final week of the festival is underway but there are still lots of amazing concerts still to come over the next 6 days. A few highlights are mentioned below. There has also been a special guest added to the Fiddlers’ Bid line-up. Infinite Scotland, a stunning multi-media production which celebrates Scotland’s countryside also to showcase at the festival.

LOTS OF AMAZING CONCERTS STILL TO GO!

Tomorrow night at the O2 ABC Aimee Mann and Amelia Curran will be performing. This year Aimee Mann celebrates 20 years since her first solo release Whatever. Last year her eighth studio album Charmer once again foregrounded all the qualities that underpin her music’s enduring potency: an unflinching fascination with human dysfunction, contradiction and frailty, together with trenchant lyrical economy and sophisticated pop savvy, the last fuelling Charmer’s delicious tension between gimlet – eyed insight and glossy 1980s-style polish.

Newfoundland singer-songwriter Amelia Curran has followed up her Juno Award-winning Hunter, Hunter album in stunning style with 2012’s intimately personal yet probingly philosophical Spectators.

Also performing tomorrow night is Anda Union with Frigg in the Old Fruitmarket. A major hit at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Anda Union are a young Mongolian band whose songs and tunes reflect the full vastness of their remote homeland, drawing on influences derived “from all the tribes that Genghis Khan unified”. They showcase an astounding array of throat singing techniques, accompanied by traditional instrumentation, combine with sturdy melodies.

Supporting tonight is Frigg. Widely tipped as successors to such seminal Nordic bands as JPP and Väsen, Finnish/Norwegian seven-piece Frigg unite deep traditional roots with a gloriously freewheeling array of Americana, Celtic and Balkan influences. Featuring multiple fiddles, mandolin, cittern, Estonian bagpipes, dobro, guitar and double bass, their dazzling virtuosity and hugely exhilarating live shows place them firmly at the forefront of contemporary international folk.

On Thursday night in the O2 ABC Scottish folk-rockers Skerryvore will be performing. They have come a long way from their island ceilidh-band beginnings on tiny Tiree, especially once their award-winning self-titled third album released in 2010 catapulted them onto the international circuit. Having since wowed crowds from Chicago to Shanghai, T in the Park to Central Park, they followed up with last summer’s buoyantly polished World of Chances.

Supporting Skerryvore is Goitse who were forged in the white-hot creative crucible of Limerick University’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, young Irish trad (-ish) quintet Goitse have certainly graduated with honours, recently winning feverish critical plaudits fro their Dónal Lunny-produced second album Transformed.

On Thursday 31st January The Songs of Robert Tannahill will be celebrated in the Mitchell Theatre. As with his definitive 12-volume series of Burns recording, Dr Fred Freeman aims as musical director of The Complete Songs of Robert Tannahill to present the Paisley weaver/poet/songwriter’s work firmly in the context of Scotland’s folk scene today, highlighting its enduring qualities – ranked by many on a par with Burns – via fresh arrangements and a top-quality musical cast. This concert launches Volume 3 in the series – of a prospective five – with singers including Rod Paterson, Nick Keir, Fiona Hunter, Brian Ò hEadhra and Lucy Pringle, plus house-band accompaniment from Aaron Jones, Angus Lyon, Marc Duff, Stewart Hardy, Frank McLaughlin and Chris Agnew.

Sam Carter and The Bonny Men will be in the Tron on Thursday 31st January. Since winning the Horizon prize for best newcomer at 2010’s Radio 2 Folk Awards, Midlands born singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Carter has been in demand everywhere from Richard Thompson’s Meltdown to the Middle East – the latter as part of British/Arabic collaboration Shifting Sands, performed at Celtic Connections in 2011. On his second album, 2012’s The No Testament, Carter adapts US devotional traditions – gospel, spirituals, shape-note singing – into his own movingly prayerful though secular hymns.

The formidable young traditional Irish eight-piece, The Bonny Men have been turning heads aplenty since they formed in early 2011, earning widespread comparisons to the Bothy Band’s early heyday.

In the Old Fruitmarket on Thursday the Hothouse Flowers will be performing. Since their chart-topping success in the late 1980s, and while continuing to make albums as the muse moves them, Ireland’s Hothouse Flowers have matured above all else into an awesomely great live band. Having started out as buskers in Dublin, when schoolmates Liam Ó Maonlaí and Fiachna Ó Braonáin formed street-theatre duo The Incomparable Benzini Brothers – becoming a band with the addition of bassist Peter O’Toole, who’s recently rejoined the line-up – they’ve never lost that freewheeling, in-the-moment dynamic, just as their music roams freely and instinctually across folk, soul, rock, blues and gospel territory. Every gig responds to and builds on its particular occasion and audience, such that no two shows are the same – except in the universal euphoria they engender, as captured on the latest Hothouse Flowers release, the 2010 live recording Goodnight Sun.

One of the most highly acclaimed folk/bluegrass bands in the UK today, Southern Tenant Folk Union will be supporting Hothouse Flowers. They have just released their fifth album (Hello Cold Goodbye Sun) and since starting out in 2006 have toured their exciting live show all over the UK, Ireland, Netherlands & Germany. A seven piece all acoustic band with banjo, mandolin, fiddle & harmony vocals they perform an eclectic mix of high energy atmospheric folk and have received airplay from Bob Harris & Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 2 and made live appearances on RTE TV (The View) & Radio 4’s Loose Ends.

On Friday 1st February “the golden voice of Africa” Salif Keita will be performing in the Old Fruitmarket. Salif Keita emerged in the 1980s as one of world music’s first international stars, following an early apprenticeship with now-legendary Malian outfits Super Rail Band de Bamako and Les Ambassadeurs. Cross-fertilising his native griot traditions and other West African sounds with pop, jazz, Latin and Islamic influences, Keita’s music has evolved from largely electric, synth-based fusions to the soulfully rootsy, organic approach of his latest acclaimed album, 2010’s La Difference.

Bwani Junction will be supporting Salif. Produced by Paul Savage (Franz Ferdinand, Brakes, Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub), Edinburgh-born band Bwani Junction headlined the BBC Introducing stage at T in the Park last year, recorded a session for Huw Stephens and supported The Vaccines and Little Comets. They have performed at a raft of festivals, with sets lined up at Latitude, The Great Escape, Liverpool Sound City and T in the Park, among others.

On Saturday 2nd February Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire and Three Blind Wolves will be performing in the O2 ABC. 2013 is shaping up to be a very big year for Glasgow singer-songwriter Roddy Hart, with his new full-band album Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire, recorded with fabled producer Danton Supple (Coldplay, Morssey), due in spring. Tonight launches an appetite-whetting EP ahead of the main release, as Hart’s darkly compelling conjunction of classic Americana and Celtic soul truly comes into its own.

Attracting comparisons with the likes of Bon Iver and the Decemberists, Glasgow four-piece Three Blind Wolves’ forthcoming debut album, Sing Hallelujah for the Old Machine, is already winning high praise and extensive advance airplay, alongside their reputation as outstanding live performers.

Also on Saturday night in the Arches The Beatstalkers, one of the very few bands to have caused an actual riot such was the screaming fan frenzy they incited as Scotland’s first real pop phenomenon. Combining blues/soul rarities with original material (and the odd early David Bowie composition), they came tantalisingly close to full-scale stardom in the mid-1960s, leaving a handful of cult-classic songs and cherished memories that eventually led to their first Barrowland reunion in 2005 – this being only the second occasion that all original members have performed together again.

Appearing with The Beatstalkers will be special guest Hamish Stuart. Having been the lead guitarist and falsetto voice of Glasgow funk legends Average White Band, he has had his fair share of hits too. After they split he joined the bands of two Beatles (Paul and Ringo), played with Aretha Franklin and wrote for Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross. Expect some Average White Band songs, as well as Stuart’s solo material.

Also added to the bill at the Arches are DJs from Glasgow’s Friday Street Club, playing a broad range of Mod records, Zoot Money, Fraser Watson (The Poets) and The Beatroots.

NEW ARTIST ADDED TO LINE UP

Special guest King Creosote will be appearing alongside Fiddlers Bid in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 2nd February. The eclectic indie folk musician, plaintive troubadour and founder of the esteemed Fence Records will bring something extra special to this Saturday night concert.

Since their triumphant 20th anniversary concert at Celtic Connections 2011, individual members of Shetland champions Fiddlers’ Bid have been busy with numerous other projects, from Kevin Henderson’s Nordic Fiddlers’ Bloc to Chris Stout and Catriona McKay’s collaboration with composer Sally Beamish, Seavaigers.

Such wide-ranging experience only replenishes the band’s primary love-affair with their native islands’ music – from the very old to the very new – and their appetite for playing together. Following huge critical acclaim for 2009’s All Dressed in Yellow, a new Bid album is currently in the works.

Also performing is Scotland’s Emily Smith has also won increasing praise for her sensitive contemporary covers and eloquent original songwriting. She’ll be previewing material from her forthcoming fifth album, due out in 2013.

INFINITE SCOTLAND TAKES TO THE ROAD AT CELTIC CONNECTIONS

SCOTLAND’S DNA is to be put under a theatrical microscope as a stunning multi-media production takes to the road as part of the Year of Natural Scotland.

Infinite Scotland, which comes to Celtic Connections on Friday 1st February at the Tron Theatre, explores the country’s contrasting landscapes, coastlines and cities in a groundbreaking project featuring breathtaking images, music, film and words.

‘Scotland small? Our multiform, infinite Scotland small?’ was a famously incredulous question posed by poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and inspiration for the show, narrated onstage by actor Blythe Duff and writer and broadcaster Kenny Taylor.

Infinite Scotland blends scientific eyes and artistic creativity with astounding results. Grains of sand under an electron microscope, revelations about the language of plants, ancient sacred places, rocks, trees, mammals, birds – discovering the life and landscape around us and how we have interacted with it over millennia is profoundly compelling.

Scottish Natural Heritage and Creative Scotland funded the project as part of the Year of Natural Scotland, which celebrates the country’s natural and historic landscapes.

The website www.infinite-scotland.com will features material from the show and extra unique content.

Source: Celtic Connections