Talisk are a Scottish folk band composed of Mohsen Amini, Hayley Keenan and Graeme Armstrong. The band rose to prominence after winning the 2015 ‘BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards’ Young Folk Award and the ‘MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards’ Folk Band Of The Year award in 2017. Amini then followed to be named the 2018 Musician of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Their debut album, Abyss, was released in 2016.
Neil McFadyen of Folk Radio UK described their music in a review as having a “driving, fiery” sound. “It’s hard to think of [another] band that has achieved so much and made such an impact on the trad music scene in their first three years,” he wrote. “They just keep piling the energy into the music, and it’s energy that sweeps their audience right along with them.”
A 2015 article on the same site by Johnny Whalley noted that “their music draws on the Irish as well as the Scottish tradition and generally cracks along at a lively pace with concertina and fiddle vying for the lead, driven by Craig’s guitar. The musicianship is phenomenal, the enthusiasm infectious and guaranteed to put a smile on your face.”
The release of their hotly anticipated second album, Beyond, in October 2018 was met with a five-star ‘Top of the World’ review in Songlines, praising the band as “incredibly infectious and endearing… fresh, invigorating, accomplished and playfully frisky.” Talisk are a purely instrumental band. Rob Adams of the Herald Scotland noted in a review that “in the absence of songs to vary the mood and tempo, they employ passages of reflection and trance-like motifs or offer a quiet melodic introduction.
