John Mulhearn – Pipes
Self Released – 13 August 2018
Glasgow-based master piper John Mulhearn is well known not just as a performer but as a composer and full-time teacher at the National Piping Centre. Over the years, John’s competed at the highest levels both as a soloist and in numerous pipe bands. He’s also been involved in various other projects including The Big Music Society, where John and fellow piper Calum MacCrimmon create new performance contexts for the pibroch, and Tryst, a relatively new collective featuring ten of the current Scottish scene’s most creative pipers. Latterly, too, John has turned his focus from pure performing onto composition – over the past couple of years, he’s clocked up an impressive tally of 25 new tunes for the pipes, with 90% of these having been composed in the past year alone.
John’s previous full-length album was 2009’s The Extraordinary Little Cough; that album, together with two successive EPs, were in truth rather strange affairs – full electronic productions, which were however still (just about audibly) based on traditional tunes and ideas. For his plainly titled new album Pipes, however, John has been inspired to explore his ideas on sound (as opposed to concentrating on the tunes themselves), specifically inviting the listener to visualise and appreciate the space in which his pipes have been recorded through the way they sound.
The acoustics of John’s chosen location, the converted church of St. Mary’s Space in Appin, are heard to be perfect for his instrument, capturing its often hidden depths, and the recordings exploit the unique timbre of the Highland pipes to the full within that context through John’s experimentation with the placing of over a dozen mics in a number of different positions to collect ambient vibrations and tones (having been aided in this regard by his co-producer, fellow-piper and NPC colleague Finlay MacDonald). John also uses a portable recorder to capture rural sounds such as the dawn chorus and a trickling burn.
Pipes is a strikingly innovative album in purely sonic terms, although the actual sound produced is often quite raw (particularly so on The Idle Pint) and invariably uncompromising. Naturally, therefore, John candidly describes Pipes as “anything but a conventional solo piping album”, although it nevertheless embodies something of a lineage to great solo piping albums.
The album consists exclusively of John’s own original music (“a combination of quite traditional style tunes, more unconventional tunes and improvisations”), amongst which stand out the stirring Nine Eight marches, the expressive and mysterious tone-poem sequence A Cage Of Snakes, the more placid Drone And Green Shoots and the joyful mighty energy of The Bigfoot Set. John’s own stamping feet often provide an exciting percussive focus, as on Looking Up, while the majestic full timbres of the pipes are exploited well on The Dawn Chorus set before the flow is interrupted midway through the track. Similar interruptions occur, somewhat disconcertingly I admit, on some of the other tracks, and even on repeated play, these don’t quite seem to make musical or dramatic sense. And I’m also not entirely on board with the crunching footsteps and other found sounds on opener Apologists, which curiously alienate rather than involve me in the experience; The Water Boatman also feels somewhat too “immersive”.
But at its most persuasive, Pipes succeeds in involving the receptive listener in a freshly perceived melding of tradition and ambience through an ageless environmental presentation of time-honoured piping technique; the closing pibroch, A Lament For Hope, is probably its most pure and perfect distillation.
Order via Bandcamp https://johnmulhearn.bandcamp.com/album/pipes-2
Pipes Track Listings:
1. Apologists (Ripple of Report, The Apologists)
2. Dundee (Dundee Police’s Welcome to Tryst, Luke Kennedy)
3. A Cage of Snakes (The Gathering Storm, A Cage of Snakes)
4. The Water Boatman
5. The Bigfoot Set (Primavera Sound, 45 to 55, Ben’s Garden Wall, The New Lanark Reel, The Squirrel Herder)
6. Wedding and Wales (The MacCrimmon Wedding, Whitebrook)
7. Drone and Green Shoots
8. The Idle Pint
9. Nine Eight (Ross Hall, James Beaton)
10. The Dawn Chorus (Kelly Nugent, Freda’s Fantastic Frying Pan, In the Pipes, The Dawn Chorus)
11. Looking Up (The Day the Curtain Dropped, The Old Schoolhouse Manchester)
12. A Lament for Hope
For more information on John please go to: www.johnmulhearn.com