Celtic Tapestry -- not an original title; there's a 1996 Shanachie collection with the same name -- consists of two discs and 32 cuts culled from Maggie Sansone's well-regarded Maggie's Music label. It's part of a series of roots anthologies that Time-Life is issuing these days.

The version I am reviewing here is a bare-bones one, mailed from corporate headquarters as two burned CDs sans packaging and liner notes.

I presume that the complete edition is attractively packaged, with informative liner notes and interesting photos, as was a recent Stanley Brothers box which Time-Life sent me in its intact form and which I'll be reviewing presently. All I can testify is that Tapestry's music, from a range of artists (Bonnie Rideout, Sue Richards, Al Petteway, et al.) signed to Sansone's imprint, is first-rate, purely acoustic and devoid of the gimmicks -- such as (groan) swirling synth sounds -- that a few years ago were getting "Celtic" records dropped into the new age bins.

Actually, this is not Celtic music -- a broad, arguably meaningless-except-as-marketing-device category that, properly defined, covers a bewildering range of styles from a variety of nations -- but Irish folk music, most of it instrumental, uniformly well-played by fiddlers, pipers, harpists and guitarists. I count five songs, nearly all familiar ones ("The Cruel Sister," "Lagan Love," "If I Were a Blackbird"), every one of them performed to a discerning listener's full satisfaction.

If you love this sort of thing (and my own appreciation of Irish traditional music feels pretty much bottomless), it's well worth picking up.