Brìghde Chaimbeul, Ross Ainslie and Steven Byrnes
LAS
Great White Records
2 September 2022
Order via Bandcamp (Digital/CD)
With LAS, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Ross Ainslie and Steven Byrnes have delivered a highly accomplished album that, probably more than any other you’ll hear this year, unifies innovation and tradition.
Innovation can take many forms. It seems reasonable to suggest that new advances in music go hand in hand with breakthroughs in the technology used to make that music or that cutting-edge songwriting is politically or philosophically inseparable from the time of its creation. But folk music tends to muddy the waters a little: the ‘structuralism-lite’ approach stumbles in the face of tradition. How is a folk musician meant to make it new when the genre seems, by definition, to be tethered to the past?
Scotland’s smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, musician and composer Ross Ainslie, and Irish guitarist/drummer Steven Byrnes seem to have the answer. Chaimbeul uses a traditional – and to some extent unfashionable – instrument in an entirely new way. Her 2019 debut, The Reeling, was a hypnotic, drone-oriented exploration of her instrument’s capabilities that touched on the techniques of modern composition while maintaining contact with the music of the past: the tunes, which came not only from Scotland but also Bulgaria, carried an inherent strangeness, an eerie beauty which Chaimbeul’s preternaturally gifted playing helped to expose. Likewise, Ainslie is no stranger to experimentation, his reflective Vana album of 2020, “designed to be listened to, continuously, from beginning to end”, found him exploring global music through a Scottish lens.
It’s a democratic set-up with each member of the trio credited equally in terms of arrangement. Alongside the traditional material, Ainslie and Chaimbeul contribute original compositions to create a dynamic that seems to draw from jazz as much as folk. But the real innovation on LAS comes in the way the tunes are composed and performed. Each one is in the key of C, and while that might not sound all that impressive to someone unversed in the history of smallpipes, it is actually the first ever example of an album to feature double C smallpipes. So if this music sounds new, if it is imbued with the ungraspable spirit of otherness, that’s because what you are hearing is genuinely unprecedented.
The opening Green Light set contains three tunes by Ainslie and one by Damien O’Kane. Over a distinctive drone, the melody quickens and skitters and, by the end, becomes a bright plume of sound with an energy verging on the ecstatic.
It’s followed up by a medley of Bulgarian tunes which flip-flop beguilingly between insistence and otherworldliness. Chaimbeul’s debut album also contained tunes from Bulgaria – they are proof that however much a specific instrument appears to be tied to a particular locality, its language is universal. Chaimbeul’s own tunes, The Badger and The Weasel, are equally impressive. The first is a jaunty meander, decorated with the bloom of nostalgia, while the second has a slipperiness to it that belies its more forthright surface.
The traditional Gavotte Pourlet shows off the smallpipes’ more stately capabilities, advancing alongside the irrevocable strums of Byrnes’ acoustic guitar, while John Patterson’s Mare (a fairly well-known Scottish pipe tune) pitches a more staccato melody against the underlying drone. Dod’s begins in a more conventional manner, with Byrnes’ guitar providing a backdrop for some acrobatic piping. Still, as it morphs into two further tunes – one by Andy Cutting and one by Asturian piper Javier Tejedor – it becomes more complex, and the interaction between the instruments becomes more impressive.
There is an unadorned feel to Strathspeys and Reels, the pipes winding in and out of each other and accelerating towards a common goal, while Lichko Lio is perhaps the album’s most dramatic moment, a slow, wild solo that tapers into a more thickly textured section full of unexpected turns and pauses.
The album concludes with a propulsive, rambunctious Irish set and Ainslie’s composition Susi & Ben’s, a more expansive medley that grows in texture as it goes along. It brings to a close a highly accomplished and outstanding album that, probably more than any other you’ll hear this year, unifies innovation and tradition.
LAS will be available to buy on CD, stream and download on all major digital platforms on Friday, 2nd September 2022.
Bandcamp: https://rossainslie.bandcamp.com/album/las