Brìghde Chaimbeul’s Sunwise: smallpipes, winter spirits and the faerie call of the Rhine

Monheim is a quiet town on the Rhine, whose core attractions include a fort – the village is situated on the Germanic border of ancient Rome – and the more recent addition of the Monheim Triennale. Centred around an adventurous three-year programme showcasing contemporary music from around the world, the Triennale constellates in venues across the town. It is in the Marienkapelle, a late Gothic chapel nestled on the banks of the river, that we meet Scottish smallpiper extraordinaire Brìghde Chaimbeul.

A star in both the trad folk scene and cutting-edge contemporary music, Chaimbeul is here to perform with Julia Úlehla, a singer who lives in the Musqueam First Nation territories of Canada. The two have previously improvised together: “Her vocal ornaments are influenced by Julia's ancestral lines, including Slavic songs sung with bagpipes”, says Chaimbeul.

It is an instance of Chaimbeul’s forward-thinking approach to piping, leading The Guardian to surmise that she “makes piping hot”, and driving Scottish smallpipes fearlessly into new territories to reach new audiences, while earning her both the BBC Young Folk Award and BBC Horizon Award.

Chaimbeul grew up in Sleat, on Skye’s south coast, her childhood and education happily saturated in music. Music teachers were many on the island – piping lessons were offered at her primary school, and a Gaelic singer would come in once a week. There was a local orchestra that introduced her to both classical music and the traditional music of the Highlands and islands. And while her first instrument was the Highland pipes, once the smallpipes entered her life, she knew her musical path was set.

Brìghde Chaimbeul (photo: Jonny Ashworth)

For this, she credits her mentor, Hamish Moore. “He was responsible for reviving the instrument in the 1980s”, she says, citing Moore’s 1985 album, Cauld Wind Pipes: “Nobody was playing the smallpipes then. Hamish saw people play the uilleann pipes in Ireland, and thought there must be a Scottish version.”

It was in 2014 that Moore first gifted the teenage Chaimbeul her first pipes – and now, 11 years on, she’s released her fourth album, Sunwise. Still only in her mid-20s, Chaimbeul’s relatively budding career is already marked by a series of groundbreaking releases. Her debut, 2019’s The Reeling, featured guest turns from Lankum’s Radie Peat and Lau’s Aidan O’Rourke, while 2022’s LAS was a powerful collaborative effort with fellow smallpiper Ross Ainslie, and guitar and mandola player Steven Byrnes. Her third album, 2023’s Carry Them with Us, brought experimental Canadian saxophonist Colin Stetson (of Arcade Fire and Bon Iver fame) into the fold of her dexterous vision.

Later at the Triennale, Chaimbeul will perform an extended version of ‘A’ Chailleach’ from Sunwise, which sees Stetson’s subliminal, subtle use of saxophone return (“the sound he makes melts into the pipes”). The track’s churning, hypnotic, layered drones entwine with an enchanted layer of vocals, summoning forth the ancient Gaelic spirits of winter, from the drawing of the cold in November, through Hogmanay, to the wild winds of February. It’s one of several vocals she includes on the album, alongside the short, rhythmic dance song, ‘She Went Astray’.

“There is, loosely, a concept to Sunwise, which is wintertime,” says Chaimbeul. whose inspiration lay in the winter character of Cailleach Bheur, a giant/goddess of Scottish folklore. “It was around October and November when I conceived these ideas; feeling that introverted darkness and the days getting shorter,” she says. “It felt like the natural place to be while I was writing. I put the tracks in a specific order – I wanted to have a journey through it so that you’re introduced to the darkness and the feeling of the winter coming in.”

To record Sunwise, Chaimbeul returned to one of her favourite haunts: Analogue Catalogue in Newry, Northern Ireland. “It’s an analogue studio, all recorded on tape. It’s interesting because a tape has half an hour of reel on it, so you have to decide there and then what you want to keep”, she says, valuing the decisive nature of the process. Much of the album is solo work, bar the three uilleann pipers who join her on ‘Sguabag/The Sweeper’ for four minutes of organised cacophony that all but blows the roof off.

There are other moments of collaboration – Chaimbeul’s father, Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul, appears on‘Duan’, singing a Hogmanay caisean (charm) he recalls from his childhood in South Uist. It’s a rhyme with Druidic associations that’s sung on a procession led by a piper, who circles round the houses of the villages three times in the motion of the sun. “Even if you take away the concept and practice of it, listening to the rhythm of the words is what drew me to it,” says Chaimbeul. Keeping it in the family, she enlists the low, sonorous voice of her younger brother Eòsaph on ‘The Rain is Wine and the Stones are Cheese’, which employs the canntaireachd technique that Chaimbuel learnt as a teenager. “Canntaireachd is a vocal style that imitates the sound of the pipes, the ornaments, and was used to teach reels and jigs before they were written down,” she says. “They’re Gaelic sounds, but they’re not words. They imitate the sounds of the ornaments. It’s like lilting in Ireland, but with harder sounds to it. Where the music was still an oral tradition, it would’ve been used right up to the 1970s.”

She notes that one of her few female smallpipe predecessors, Rona Lightfoot, also employed the canntaireachd. This reflection on Lightfoot’s legacy – she was the first woman to compete professionally only 50 years ago – gives cause to contemplate how far the female piping community has come. Today, Scotland’s smallpipes community is a flourishing one, with more girls playing in junior competitions and school bands, largely drawn to the musical potential of smallpipes that Chaimbuel has made possible to envision.

A spirit of innovation, a Fae-like easing through the borders between musics – from traditional tunes to rigorous minimalism, psychedelic trance to contemporary classical, fuelled by the smallpipes’ deep and bassy drones – is a core part of Chaimbeul’s practice as a performer and composer. Take, for example, the massive unwavering single note that slowly, very slowly – and perhaps in the imagination as much as in the ears – shimmers, ripples, lightens and breaks open over the epic nine minutes of the billowing opening track, ‘Dùsgadh/Waking’.

“I always wanted to have just a single-note track, so that you really have to listen in to the depth of the drone,” says Chaimbeul of the piece. “The past year I’ve been touring solo a lot, and I’ve been getting braver about playing for a more elongated time on stage, doing very long drone pieces.”

As a conceptual work, the sound bath that is Sunwise is a magical musical procession into the depths of winter, and winter’s mythology, into the reflective melancholy of the darkest months. In conceiving this winter set, Chaimbeul drew deeply on her fascination for the realms of Celtic, Gaelic, Faerie and other pre-Christian lore, realms that saturate the landscape and music of the Highlands and Islands as much as the chill of winter.

“I’m very drawn to these stories, as a Gaelic speaker, and that being a part of my identity,” she says. “The pipes and all those stories go together very naturally. These stories are not necessarily logical, and the pipes are always in them. It’s always the constant, trance-like sound of the pipes you hear in a mysterious setting. They always come up in the idea of being bewitched,” she smiles, knowingly. “And it’s always the piper who ends up in the realm of faerie.”

Perhaps Menheim’s festival audience will follow the faerie call of the pipes tonight when Chaimbeul boards the MS RheinFantasie to perform ‘Where the Veil is Thin’ (a live extension of ‘A’ Chailleach’s’ eternal winter journey) on the dark waters of the Rhine. Might they hear the Lorelei below? And will the piper who probes music’s unknown realms find protection – and inspiration – from the Fae folk? Watch this space…

+ Brìghde Chaimbeul is touring Sunwise from September 3. Sunwise is out now on Glitterbeat Records