Born from the thriving traditional music sessions of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, The Long Dark is a five-piece ensemble exploring the shadowed edges of Celtic music. The band calls its sound Celtic Noir: traditional songs and melodies drawn into a landscape of atmospheric electronics, unconventional arrangements, ancient instruments, and the strange, elemental beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
The name itself comes from the long autumn and winter nights of the region—the months when daylight retreats, darkness settles early, and the landscape seems to exist somewhere between waking and dreaming. It is within that twilight, the gloaming, that The Long Dark finds its musical home.
Fiddler Christine Traxler is the heart and soul of the ensemble. A veteran session musician and Shakespeare teacher, she plays with an intuitive grace and brings a keen understanding of drama, symbolism, wit and storytelling to the band's arrangements.
Multi-instrumentalist Lennart Jansson has become something of a wunderkind of the Pacific Northwest session scene, performing on fiddle, viol d’amore, concertina, uilleann pipes and seemingly anything else he can get his hands on. Having performed around the country with musicians including accordionist John Whelan, Jansson brings an emotional immediacy and deep affection for Celtic tradition to The Long Dark.
Flutist and piper Cameron St Louis combines musical instinct with the mind of an inventor. Equally at home on flute, whistle, Flemish bagpipes and smallpipes, he has an uncanny ability to find the melody hiding inside an arrangement. A builder of his own whistles and an experimenter with modern instrument-making techniques, St Louis brings both enthusiasm and a quietly analytical musical intelligence to the ensemble.
At the center of The Long Dark's arrangements is Drake Caraker, the band's principal arranger, pianist, guitarist and resident mad scientist. With a background in music composition and engineering, Caraker continually pushes the ensemble beyond the expected boundaries of Celtic music. His piano can be wistful and elegant; his distinctive guitar playing supplies something altogether different—a dark, visceral undercurrent that can feel primal, carnal and almost tribal. If Traxler is the heart of The Long Dark, Caraker is its North Star, continually asking not simply how a piece should be played, but what else it might become.
Completing the ensemble is Newcastle upon Tyne-born vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Kríostóir Clements, whose four-octave voice moves from an intimate baritone to a keening lyric tenor capable of soaring above the ensemble or burrowing deep into its darkest arrangements. Also performing on low whistle, melodeon, shruti box and synthesizer, Clements approaches traditional song as storytelling and invocation. His performances have been described as “watching someone weave a spell.”
The five musicians met through years of playing together in sessions throughout Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. The chemistry was immediate enough that when Traxler suggested they form a band, there was little hesitation. One observer of the local traditional music community has since dubbed them “the supergroup of the Seattle session scene.”
Though still a young ensemble, The Long Dark quickly began attracting attention. Performances at the Cascade Celtic Festival in 2025 and 2026 established the group as one of the festival's talked-about acts, while an appearance at Outlanders Opry in 2025 placed them as the lone Celtic ensemble among a bill of bluegrass and old-time musicians. Their sets have drawn particular attention for unexpected interpretations of Radiohead's “Everything in Its Right Place” and Massive Attack's “Teardrop,” alongside striking reimaginings of traditional songs and tunes.
Those choices reveal much about The Long Dark's musical world. The band draws deeply from the tradition and from groups such as The Gloaming and The Bothy Band, but Radiohead, Sigur Rós and the possibilities of contemporary experimental music are equally present in its imagination. Tradition is not treated as something preserved behind glass, but as living material—something that can be stretched, darkened, illuminated and transformed without losing the ancient thread running through it.
The result is music for the gloaming: sometimes beautiful, sometimes unsettling, occasionally playful, and always searching for whatever might be hiding beneath the surface.
The Long Dark calls it Celtic Noir.