Brighde Chaimbeul Sunwise

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.”