Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul - Summer Tour Dates 2023

The last twelve months have been musically eventful for the innovative Scottish smallpipes player and experimental music purveyor Brìghde Chaimbeul, who has a busy few months ahead. She’ll be making plenty of festival appearances, delivering both solo and collaborative performances. Below, we take a brief look back at Brìghde’s album releases to date.

Brìghde made a huge impression with her 2019 debut album, The Reeling, which was released on the relatively new Rough Trade imprint River Lea at the time, whose wonderful mission read that River Lea is “dedicated to releasing beautiful and strange music from Britain, Ireland and beyond”.

That debut featured Aidan O Rourke (Lau), who also produced the album, Radie Peat (Lankum) and Rona MacDonald Lightfoot of South Uist. As noted in David Kidman’s review: Brìghde credits her own initial inspiration for taking up the pipes to veteran piper and pioneer of canntaireachd (a phonetic singing tradition used for teaching pipe tunes) Rona Lightfoot, whom she heard play (this was at age four – she began studying the instrument only three years later!). It’s only right, then, that Rona can be heard guesting on The Reeling (she chants the canntaireachd on three tracks). Also making supportive and spirited contributions are Lankum’s Radie Peat (concertina on three tracks) and Aidan O’Rourke (fiddle on three).

Brìghde is playing with Aidan at the Irish weekend festival ‘Another Love Story’ (20 August) and Southwell Music Festival (25 August – not to be confused with Gate to Southwell, which has already taken place this year). Here they are performing together live from Sligachan on the Isle of Skye for Skye Live Festival in 2021.

In 2022, Brìghde joined forces with Ross Ainslie and Steven Byrnes for LAS. A Featured Album of the Month on Folk Radio, Thomas Blake referred to the album in his review as “a highly accomplished and outstanding album that, probably more than any other you’ll hear this year, unifies innovation and tradition.”

They will once again be reunited at Wickham Festival, so if you’re at the festival this year, don’t miss this set. Here they are performing The Green Light Set – It opens to three tunes by Ross: Green Light of the Lonely Souls, Bob the Banter and Peel Pier Fear and ends on a tune ‘Castlerock Road’ by Damien O’Kane that he recorded with David Kosky for his 2011 Irish instrumental album ‘The Mystery Inch’.

Most recently, Brìghde released ‘Carry Them with Us’, released on tak:til/ Glitterbeat back in April. The album also featured Canadian sound explorer and saxophonist Colin Stetson (Arcade Fire), who also co-produced the album.

Thomas Blake opened his album review: It is a quirk of musical fate that some of the most traditional forms can produce the most experimental sounds. Brìghde Chaimbeul is an instrumentalist from Skye who is steeped in the musical and oral traditions of the islands and highlands of Scotland but whose music is as invigorating and new as anything currently being produced in either folk or contemporary avant-garde circles. Her chosen instrument – the Scottish smallpipes – enables her to create two simultaneous drones and pick out a melody over the top, a technique that gives equal space to modernist composition and generations-old folk song, merging the two seamlessly and with dreamlike clarity. The Reeling, her 2019 solo debut, was met with unanimous praise from across a vast spectrum of critical outlets, and Carry Them With Us looks set to gain even greater acclaim.

He wasn’t wrong, he concludes by describing the album as an “…extraordinary experience that has slowly begun to resemble a series of strange, beautiful dream-stories, told with flair, nuance and incredible technical proficiency, but more importantly, with a real sense of ambition and innovation.”

Watch the accompanying video to the melancholic Pìobaireachd Nan Eun | The Birds, one of a clutch of tunes directly inspired by bird calls.

The video was conceptualised and shot by Jordan Young and John Smith.

The track has two distinct melodies – one mimics the song of a swan that swam on Loch Chaluim Chille. The loch was drained in 1829 in an effort to reclaim arable ground. The idea of something as alive as a body of water disappearing is kind of wild, right? We filmed on a perfect winter night in sight of the Lochan, projecting footage of Skye lasses playing in the water (including Brìghde herself) live on to the side of a ruined church.