The rise of Brìghde Chaimbeul has been quietly meteoric. In little over half a decade, the Scottish smallpipes player has gone from a teenager winning local piping contests to a leading figure in the worldwide experimental music community. She has graced the stages of genre-defining music festivals like Le Guess Who? and Supersonic, played on Caroline Polachek’s most recent album and struck up a lasting collaboration with pioneering Canadian sax experimentalist Colin Stetson.
Stetson appeared on Chaimbeul’s last album – the avant-garde art-folk masterpiece Carry Them With Us (2023) and he appears on Sunwise too, albeit in a smaller and more subtle role. Whereas Carry Them With Us was a predominantly collaborative effort, Sunwise is very much a Brìghde Chaimbeul solo record. She had already found her distinctive musical voice; here, she is using it in new and unfettered ways. One of the first things we notice about Chaimbeul’s sound is her insistence on strangeness, mystery, otherness. The smallpipes, with their inherent drone, lend themselves to this. Opener Dùsgadh – a nine-minute plateau of sound – drops the listener straight in at the deep end. The drone at first seems incessant and unyielding, but the more you listen, the more you begin to notice small melodic turns and shifts. This is where drones can be strangely and surprisingly human – they show up every nuance and disruption in the physical actions of the musician, either accidental or deliberate. Small progressions can signal dramatic shifts in mood, a piece of music can slither unnoticed between worlds: from melancholy to elation, from darkness to light. It’s no surprise that this track’s Gaelic title translates as ‘Waking’.
Even more than in previous albums, Celtic folklore is embedded in Sunwise. A’ Chailleach (which means ‘The Old Woman’) is a kind of companion piece to Dùsgadh. It is the one track on the album to feature Stetson, and deals with the mythological figure Cailleach Bheurr, the bringer of winter. It is more mischievous, fretful and swirling than the preceding piece, its minimalist patterns soon becoming hypnotic and deceptive. Again, that theme of slight but meaningful change. And then the change becomes sudden: the surprise element of Chaimbeul’s clear, crystalline singing. It’s not often she sings, but when she does, it always creates a moment of magic. In this case, it seems to conjure a kind of mystical or pagan dialogue with the winter landscape.
Dialogue and contrast are key components of Sunwise. The fog-horn repetitiveness of the pipes on She Went Astray is beautifully counterbalanced by multitracked vocals, while Bog an Lochan sets a quick-fingered melody over the ever-present drone. A kind of musical conversation is achieved through collaboration on Sguabag/The Sweeper, which was recorded live as part of a group with three uilleann pipers: John McSherry, Francis McIlduff, and Jamie Murphy. It’s an energetic piece, full of interlocking components. And although the human voice is used sparingly, it provides some of the album’s most powerful moments. Duan features a spoken section by Aonghas Phàdraig Chaimbeul, Brìghde’s father, reciting a rhyme from a Hogmanay ritual as burning wood crackles in the background (a direct reflection of an earlier track on the album, Kindle the Fire, a short experiment in field recording).
Duan exemplifies Sunwise’s deep connection to pre-Christian Scottish folklore and tradition, and the closing track, The Rain Is Wine and the Stones Are Cheese (one of a handful of traditional songs here), embeds itself even more firmly in that tradition. It’s a delightful minute-long example of canntaireachd, a method of wordlessly vocalising pipe music which enables traditional tunes to be passed down without the need for written notation. It’s a truly democratic and admirably practical way of disseminating musical knowledge and history, and perhaps modern teaching methods could learn something from it. In this case, it also creates a positive, hopeful and lively piece of music in its own right, a perfect full stop on an album which treats experimentation and tradition with equal respect and always with an overriding sense that music is meant to be enjoyed. Chaimbeul is a serious artist, but one completely tuned in to the joys of her profession.
Sunwise (June 27th, 2025) Glitterbeat/tak:til
Pre-Order: https://brighdechaimbeul.bandcamp.com/album/sunwise
Live Dates
Tue 5 Aug – The Sidmouth Folk Festival
Fri 29 Aug – Moseley Folk & Arts Festival, Moseley Park, Birmingham
Sat 30 Aug – Smugglers Festival, near Deal, East Kent
Wed 17 Sept – London, Round Chapel
Thu 18 Sept – Bristol, The Mount Without
Fri 19 Sept – Brighton Komedia
Sun 21 Sept – Cambridge Junction
Mon 22 Sept – Manchester, Band on the Wall
Tue 23 Sept – Leeds, Brudenell Social
Wed 24 Sept – Glasgow, Òran Mór
Thu 25 Sept – Edinburgh, Pleasance Theatre