Geeta Dayal
In the Scottish musician’s incantatory new album, a mesmerizing blend of folk traditions and experimental sounds.
Sunwise, by Brìghde Chaimbeul, Tak:Til/Glitterbeat
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In the work of Brìghde Chaimbeul, modern experimental music merges with traditional Scottish Gaelic songs from throughout the centuries. Her albums don’t just resurrect long-lost lore; they move the past into the future.
Born in 1998 on the rambling, rural Isle of Skye, Chaimbeul grew up surrounded by nature. Her first language was Gaelic; her parents are writers and artists. She once described being inspired before birth by the melodies of a piper who played near her mother; Chaimbeul heard music while in the womb.
She began learning piano and violin at an early age, but the pipes beckoned. Smallpipes—softer counterparts to the bombastic Highland bagpipes—are modest in size, hand-powered by compact bellows. They can produce intriguing drones, sounding somewhat similar to the harmonium.
Chaimbeul’s smallpipes playing is surreal and layered. There is a rich sense of lineage; her material frequently incorporates time-honored Gaelic songs and stories from the Highlands and the many islands of Scotland. Her debut, The Reeling (2019), recorded in a church, features an appearance from Rona Lightfoot, the famed female piper who inspired Chaimbeul as a child. Chaimbeul’s arrangements are often stark, unadorned with the embellishments and flourishes one would expect from old-fashioned tunes. She uses minimalism and repetition to create a mesmerizing, trancelike atmosphere. Her music doesn’t appear nostalgic for the past; it sounds current.
This contemporary edge became even more evident in Carry Them With Us (2023), Chaimbeul’s second album. For several pieces, she employed the avant-saxophonist Colin Stetson—a figure more generally associated with jazz and indie rock—for a series of collaborations. The tracks are based on bygone Gaelic melodies, but they are charged with raw vitality and new energy.
Sunwise, her latest record, continues her fertile explorations into folklore and ancient language, meshed with concentrated drones and hypnotic repetition. Three of the songs are written by Chaimbeul; the rest have roots in archival material, several inspired by field recordings culled from the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh.
Brìghde Chaimbeul. Courtesy Forced Exposure. Photo: Jonny Ashworth.
The album is transporting in a way that few are. I listened to Sunwise on an oppressively hot day in Los Angeles, while police helicopters flew ominously overhead and protests raged in the distance. The tunes put me instantly at ease; I imagined that I was wandering through the streets, many centuries ago, in dark, rainy Scotland. I could picture the gray cobblestones, the wet earth, the bogs, lush forests and castles. The first song, “Dùsgadh / Waking,” unveils the landscape. “Dùsgadh,” which means “awakening” in Gaelic, evokes a frozen winter morning. The drones are slow-moving and peaceful.
In “A’ Chailleach,” the next piece, Stetson’s saxophone quietly joins in with Chaimbeul’s pipes. Chaimbeul also contributes vocals, in a chant that threads throughout, conjuring a potent and heavy atmosphere.
Some pieces are brief fragments that play like interludes or forgotten snippets of melodies from antique music boxes. “Bog an Lochan” (“Bog of the Small Loch”), meanwhile, is the album’s centerpiece. It draws from a folk dance, but the fast pace and brittle timbre comes across like electronic music. “Sguabag / The Sweeper” continues the high level of energy—a riotous unison of four pipers, including Chaimbeul, that is recorded live and is appealingly rough around the edges.
With “Duan,” the record shifts gears again. The word means “song” or “poem” in Gaelic, and the track encapsulates both. It begins with a triumphant swirl of pipes and ends with a dramatic recitation by Chaimbeul’s father, Aonghas Phàdraig Chaimbeul. The lyrics reference Hogmanay celebrations—Scotland’s New Year—and claim connections to druids.
The closing piece, with the curious title “The Rain Is Wine and the Stones Are Cheese,” sounds like a raucous sing-along around a crackling fire. Sung by Chaimbeul and her brother Eòsaph in canntaireachd, an ancient language once used for pipe music, the track is jubilant but mysterious at the same time.
There are many touchstones for Chaimbeul’s music outside of Scottish smallpipes and the folk realm. The bracing intensity reminds me of some of the bands I listened to in the 1980s and 1990s, a particular strand of darkly melodic rock and pop—Swans, Dead Can Dance, Bauhaus, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds—heady, ritualistic music that feels like it comes from a distant land.
You can also hear links between Chaimbeul’s work and twentieth-century experimental compositions. Chaimbeul has mentioned the 1960s tape pieces of Steve Reich as a major inspiration. “I have a really strong memory of hearing [Reich] when I was eleven or twelve . . . I was really blown away and that’s stuck with me ever since,” she told the Quietus in an interview. “It was the track ‘Come Out’ that my mum played to me. I suppose I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ that specific feeling. I’ve always loved that track ever since. I guess there’s some common ground in that I like to explore repetitiveness, and get into that feeling of hearing the same thing over and over but then it slightly changes. I think I’ve only just scratched the surface of how that can work with drones.” You can draw comparisons between Chaimbeul and other avant-garde composers, too—from Yoshi Wada’s powerful bagpipe drones to Terry Riley’s radiant minimalist orchestrations to Éliane Radigue’s slow-burning synthesizer epics.
In Sunwise, Chaimbeul has created a work of unique depth, steeped in Scotland, in history. In a welcome contrast to our fast-paced, chaotic digital lifestyles, Sunwise beckons us to slow down, to embrace the analog past. Her particular take on folk music doesn’t feel like a reenactment or a faithful, by-the-numbers tribute. She works within tradition to extend it. Her music is like a spell or an incantation, where the old, dusty past is revitalized and renewed, roaring vividly back to life.
Geeta Dayal is an arts critic and journalist specializing in twentieth-century music, culture, and technology. She has written extensively for frieze and many other publications, including the Guardian, Wired, the Wire, Bookforum, Slate, the Boston Globe, and Rolling Stone. She is the author of Another Green World (Bloomsbury, 2009), a book on Brian Eno, and is currently at work on a new book on music.