01. Dùsgadh/Waking (09:21)
02. A’ Chailleach (07:31)
03. kindle the fire (00:39)
04. She Went Astray (01:41)
05. Bog an Lochan (02:23)
06. Sguabag/The Sweeper (04:20)
07. Duan (03:56)
08. The Rain is Wine and the Stones Are Cheese (00:59)

After the remarkable success and acclaim that greeted her second album Carry Them With Us (tak:til / Glitterbeat, 2023), Scottish composer and small pipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul returns with a magic(k)al third album, Sunwise, which sees her push forward experimentally but also immerse her music more deeply in tradition, folklore and mystery.

Chaimbeul has travelled in a short time from her roots as a teenage piping contest winner into a fearless, widescreen artistry. She appeared on avant-pop paragon Caroline Polachek’s last album, has collaborated with Canadian composer/saxophonist Colin Stetson on her previous album (and this one also) and in the last couple of years has graced the stages of premier experimental festivals such as Big Ears (US), Le Guess Who? (NL) and Supersonic (UK).

Sunwise is a revelatory album, steeped in landscape, ritual, minimalism and the eternal presence of the drone.

This record follows the embrace of winter time; the closing in of darkness, the cold, the pull to turn inward. But also, the customs of the season, and gathering for the ceilidh: songs and stories told round the fire; where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur.’

Thus, Brìghde Chaimbeul introduces her third album, a release which comes after two years of incredible acclaim for its predecessor Carry Them With Us, which won awards from such diverse places as The Guardian (Best Folk Album Of 2023 #7) and The Quietus (Best Albums of 2023 #13). Since that album, she has played stages from Tennessee to Denmark, often far outside the traditional / folk circuit where she first made her name, and often playing for audiences who’d never seen someone play small pipes before. To appear alone on the main stage at last year’s Supersonic Festival in Birmingham and reduce a hungover festival crowd to rapt silence probably isn’t what Chaimbeul expected, and nor would she have expected to be hailed as leading a revival of interest in an instrument that was arguably fading into obscurity.

Sunwise is more a solo record than Carry Them With Us, which saw her collaborate with acclaimed artist and peripatetic collaborator Colin Stetson. Chaimbeul explains that she’d spent the last two years playing live solo, “so that’s where I was naturally going at the time of recording, most of the collaborators came on after I had recorded my parts”, the exception being Sguabag/The Sweeper where she recorded live with the three other pipers. She explains that she’s learned a great deal about how to record her instrument, where “a lot of it is about tone, and the depth and richness of that tone, paying attention to detail – what mics you’re using, and how to get the best sound possible.” However, Stetson returns on the rousing, whirling A Chailleach, which also features Chaimbeul’s lovely, sparingly used voice.

A Chailleach and its preceding Dùsgadh / Waking, Chaimbeul explains, suggest “the beginning of winter, the darkness creeping in and the cold and the long nights, and also tying in with this Celtic folkloric character, the Cailleach Bheurr, who was known to bring in the winter or was associated with the bad weather and the winter time and the sort of uncomfortable parts of winter… this is kind of her waking up, roaming the moors with her walking stick, making sure she was getting rid of any greenery that was growing through and keeping that sharp frost in the air.”

There’s a spoken word contribution from her father Aonghas Phàdraig Chaimbeul on Duan, which is a rhyme related to New Year’s Night / Hogmanay folkore, with druidical origins, and was used to accompany the oidhche challain, “a disorderly procession that went three times sunwise according to the course of the sun round each house in the village, preceded in many cases by a piper and reciting, on coming to your door, this rhyme”, Chaimbeul explains. “Although the Hogmanay caisean (charm) isn’t followed exactly like that anymore, my dad remembers it from his childhood, and remembers that rhyme. He grew up in South Uist in the 50s.”

These three tracks were composed by Chaimbeul (although A Chailleach features a traditional waulking song). The rest are traditional, arranged by Chaimbeul and taken from a variety of sources, but primarily field recordings from the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh.

Chaimbeul’s brother Eòsaph also appears, his voice joining hers on the closing The Rain is Wine & The Stones Are Cheese, a short but bracing song to mark the longest and therefore darkest night of the year, delivered in the style of canntaireachd (a traditional means of vocalising bagpipe music).

Sunwise is a remarkable album, a record steeped in folklore and tradition but also embracing minimalism, experimentation and the eternal presence of the drone. Her love for this music, these traditions and shared stories, shines through everything she does.

“It’s a music and language that has survived so much and for so long – it’s the music of people. It’s music of the land. And I think it’s extremely relevant to hold on to that and learn from that in current times.”

Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul is a leading purveyor of experimental Celtic music. Her piping has earned her a BBC Young Folk Award and a BBC Horizon Award. Her second album “Carry Them With Us” is an exhilarating weave of rich textural drones, trance atmospheres and instrumental folk traditions. Acclaimed Canadian sound explorer and saxophonist Colin Stetson is a featured collaborator on the record. ——————————————-
Stories make humanity. They shape us, explain us, give us a solid place in the world. They show us who we are, our myths, our hopes, our past. Everything has its story. Stories can be told in music as well as words, and on her second album, Carry Them with Us, Brìghde Chaimbeul reveals hers. From her heart, from the Scottish tradition that formed her. And every one of them weaves its spell, as a good story should.

The Scottish smallpipes, with their double-note drones, were in danger of falling into obscurity before Brìghde (pronounced Bree-chuh) Chaimbeul, a native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Skye, became part of their more recent revival. Her piping has earned her a BBC Young Folk Award and a Horizon Award, and seen her perform for heads of state at the Cop 26 climate conference in Glasgow. She’s brought the instrument to a global stage, and with this album, she’s taken it beyond folk music, discovering a place where the tradition and minimalism meet, offering her the freedom to experiment in sound and create something completely her own.

“I’m always led by the drone,” Chaimbeul explains. “To be a piper you must have a natural attraction to drones. That’s the minimalist aspect, the atmosphere it creates, rather than a rhythm. The other side is melody, one or two of them in a tune, repeating them so it becomes trance-like, and getting lost in them a little bit.”

Carry Them with Us is undoubtedly Chaimbeul’s vision, but collaborator Colin Stetson, an experimental saxophonist and film composer probably best known for his work with Arcade Fire, helped her realise it.

“The sound he creates is the sound in my head, it was what I was going for.” Their musical partnership began on Twitter, not long after she released her acclaimed first album (The Reeling). “He tweeted something and I started listening to his music. He uses atmospheres that inspired me. During lockdown he contacted me to record something for a documentary and I asked him if he’d listen to a track of mine. That was in 2021, and he came over for a week in July last year. We were basically writing and recording at the same time, playing together. Considering he came in cold, what he achieved was amazing. I got so much from working with Colin.”

They seem to inhabit the same space, breathe the same air. Often it’s hard to tell where one instrument ends and the other begins – as she notes, “his style and breathing fit with the pipes.” It’s hypnotic, alive – listen to “Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom: I Am Disposed of Mirth,” where the music sometimes seems to suddenly bubble and flutter into the air. It’s not studio trickery, simply the way they played.

“There are times it sounds as if something’s going on,” Chaimbeul agrees, “but it was all organic. Only a few of the tracks have overdubs, because of sound bleeding from microphones, and for layering textures, such as with the harmonium. I like to keep it live, for that flavour. The only studio tinkering was some basic mixing.”

Both musicians are innovators -“there are times he sings into the sax to give a different tone and texture,” Chaimbeul says, while she has developed a way to coax alternative tunings from her smallpipes. With the constancy of the drone as their foundation, and small changes to the melodies as they progressed, the music becomes immersive as Chaimbeul and Stetson weave over and around each other.

Together, they created an album of stories. Some, like “Crònan (i)” came spontaneously as the pair played in the studio. Others, “Pilliù: The Call of the Redshank” and “Pìobaireachd Nan Eun: The Birds,” grew from traditional pieces.

“They’re inspired by birds. They come up often in Gaelic folklore, and in old songs connected to piping,” Chaimbeul explains. “You often find vocables that are meant to imitate bird song, which I love, like the swan on “Pìobaireachd Nan Eun.” It’s as if there’s a connection between Gaelic and the language of birds.”

Those old things, stories, birdsong, are part of the tradition that surrounded Chaimbeul as she grew up.

“They’re a way of connecting to old things, to understand their value, and bring them to life.”

Chaimbeul tells them with a voice that’s completely her own. Her singing at the close of “Bonn Beinn Eadarra: The Haunting,” arrives like a ghost, its spectral feel lingering long after the track is over. On “Banish the Giant of Doubt And Despair,” her playing brings the tale alive, as the daughter of the king of the land under the waves sings a tune before her wedding, and then when a giant, marauding the Western Isles, hears her. Enraptured, he cannot stop dancing, he ends up in the Atlantic, to the island of Hiort, where he topples over and drowns. Everything is there; the joy, the movement, the way it speeds up, turning wild and abandoned as the giant is captured by the dance. It’s storytelling in music, the past given new colours.

Stories even inhabit the album’s title. The phrase Carry Them with Us comes from Scotland’s Iain Sheonaidh Smus, a man who was able to recite all the old tales from memory.

“If someone asked for one that he didn’t want to tell just then, he’d say, ‘I didn’t carry it with me,’” Chaimbeul says. “So it’s the idea of carrying all the stories and the songs with us.”

Tradition shaped Brìghde Chaimbeul, and she wears that history proudly. But on Carry Them with Us, she shows her music has grown beyond labels. It might draw on folk music and minimalism, but led by the drone, she’s taken the leap to tell new stories.