Tone Glow 184: Brìghde Chaimbeul
An interview with the Scottish piper about Gaelic folklore, the pipes as a drone instrument, and her new album 'Sunwise'
Brìghde Chaimbeul
Brìghde Chaimbeul (b. 1998) is a Scottish piper from the Isle of Skye. Trained in folk music but also influenced by minimalist composers and other traditions, she has collaborated with folk luminaries like Ross Ainslie and Lankum’s Radie Peet as well as popular artists like Caroline Polachek and Colin Stetson. She released her first album, The Reeling, in 2019, and her second, Carry Them With Us, in 2023.
Chaimbeul’s recordings are firmly rooted in tradition, but lean into the possibilities of the studio to expand that vocabulary. Building on the insight that the pipes are inherently a drone instrument, her albums and shows use echo effects, layering, and careful sound design to put listeners in the position of the piper enveloped by drone. A native Gaelic speaker and the daughter of a prominent Gaelic language poet, she also incorporates Gaelic singing and folklore into the structure of her music. Her upcoming album, Sunwise (out June 27th on Glitterbeat) is shaped around the winter season, the mythical figure of the Cailleach, winter gatherings of dance and storytelling, and the traditional New Year’s celebrations of the Hogmanay. The album’s lead single, “Bog an Lochan,” is out now.
Alex Fields spoke with Chaimbeul on March 23rd, 2025 via Zoom to discuss collaborating with Colin Stetson, the differences between her three albums, and Hogmanay customs. Chaimbeul will begin her first ever U.S. tour with shows at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, TN. She will be playing throughout the US and Canada throughout the next two months. Tour dates can be found here.
Alex Fields: How are you?
Brìghde Chaimbeul: I’m good, how are you?
I’m good. I’m excited to talk to you, I’m a fan of all your albums and was excited when I saw you were added to the Big Ears line up. They send out a form after each year’s festival asking what three artists who weren’t there you’d like to see next year, and last year I listed both you and Lankum. So when I saw you were both coming this year I thought, hey, they listened (laughter). I want to start by going into your background. My family’s from a very rural part of Appalachia with a strong folk music connection, and you’re from Skye, right?
Mmhmm.
So I’m interested in how vibrant the traditional folk scenes are in the more rural areas. Are you from a musical family, did you grow up playing?
Yeah, I have four sisters and a brother, and my two older sisters played, so you know I was always seeing them play music when I was younger. My parents aren’t musicians but there was a lot of music in the community. In school there was a lot of music and there were singing classes throughout the day. Then there were musicians in the area who were teaching, so it was very accessible to get piano lessons or fiddle lessons, that sort of thing. I’d say that the most exposure I had to music growing up would’ve been in school.
What were the classes like?
There was Gaelic singing. The school I went to was a Gaelic primary school, so all the classes and everything was through the medium of Gaelic. So we’d have Gaelic, and then a fiddle teacher—she was a folk fiddler—and then obviously there was a bagpipe teacher as well, so that’s obviously traditional music. I’d say the music classes were just “general music” but they were always influenced by traditional or Gaelic music.
Were there community jam sessions? What was public performance like, and how often did you get to hear live music?
The place I grew up in was called Sleat and there’s a festival there every summer. There’s also a promoter who puts on gigs from the area, so we actually had quite a lot of visiting musicians in different genres—a lot of folk, maybe even some classical as well. If people were to come to play in Skye, Sleat was one of the main spots other than Portree [the capital and largest town].
When did you start playing, how old were you?
When I first started learning the pipes, I was about seven. You first start on the practice chanter, which is just the finger pipe, then I got a set of Highland pipes when I was nine.
When did you pick up the smallpipes?
I picked up the smallpipes when I was fourteen or fifteen. So I met the guy who made my pipes when I was about fourteen, and he gave me a set to play. And yeah, that was it.
Did you instantly fall in love with the smallpipes and switch to them as your primary instrument? Or when did you know that was the one for you?
What I loved about it when I first started was the ability to play with others. It was more accessible to other people in that way, so it was a first taste of collaboration. Thinking about it, it probably was quite an instant love because I feel that I found my own style, or my own voice, in the smallpipes.
That’s funny that you talk about being able to play with other people. As a teenager, I was not good, but I played the fiddle, and I had a friend who played the Highland pipes. We didn’t perform but we’d play together casually and I couldn’t even hear my fiddle two inches from my ear—the pipes were so loud.
Yeah, and also the thing is most Highland pipes are in between—they’re not really in concert pitch, they’re in between B flat and B. Regardless of the volume, even just the tuning is hard to work with, but the smallpipes are in concert pitch, so it’s more of an option there.
Did you grow up speaking Gaelic? Is it actually spoken as the day-to-day language where you’re from?
Yeah, Gaelic is my first language and I spoke it with my family. It’s spoken day to day around Scotland; it’s a minority language but it does exist.
I know you’ve spoken a lot about language and the connection of Gaelic to your music. I’m wondering how being a native speaker affects it. I used to play Scottish music but I don’t speak the language and it’s interesting to think about how that changes how you hear the tunes if you know the words or the language where it’s originally a song, or how it affects your playing or phrasing.
Yeah I think there’s two points phrasing-wise. A lot of tunes I play do come from song—I think it might be possibly quite specific to the pipes, with the lack of dynamic articulation that you can use, so I take a lot of the phrasing elements from the rhythm of the words and where the words would naturally breathe, where’d you have a breath. It’s probably one of the reasons I’m so attracted to older tunes that are kind of… they’re quite simple but they either have a haunting melody or trance-y rhythm, that repetition. A lot of those tunes are connected to a Gaelic song, and it’s probably one of the reasons I am so attracted to finding those tunes.
Do you find most of the tunes you perform from archival recordings?
Yeah, the main source would be field recordings from the School of Scottish Studies.
One thing that I find really interesting about your albums is how much you’re able to lean into the opportunities that the studio provides as opposed to live performance. That’s somewhat rare in traditional folk music. I think of traditional music as live music, and not that I don’t love the recordings, but it’s something you want to experience live if at all possible. Your albums find a path to making the studio work to their benefit. A lot of what you’ve recorded maybe couldn’t have been done live in quite the same way or take advantage of the opportunities offered. What were your first experiences in the studio and how did you find the way you work in the studio?
My first album [The Reeling (2019)] was recorded in a church and it’s pretty much live. And then for my second album [Carry Them With Us (2023)] I worked with Colin Stetson. That was quite a different experience. Although we did record a lot of it live, or together in the same room, it was much more of embracing studio elements and enhancing certain parts of the instruments. It made me appreciate that recording an album is a thing in itself, and playing live is a separate thing; it’s fun to use the techniques that are there.
When I play live, especially when the pipes are so close to my ear and particularly in a really lovely space, you can hear all the harmonics and frequencies of the drones and the pipes ringing together. It’s quite a full and rich sound acoustically. And quite often, going through mics and stuff like that, you might lose a sense of richness, so I try to bring that as much as possible to where you’re like sitting inside the bag, or just getting that all-encompassing acoustic sound. It’s sort of like being in the room with ten smallpipes playing, playing a drone or playing a set of notes—it’s a really full, deep buzz. I like to try and bring that as much as possible in the studio as well.
I think a lot about how if you’re in a jam session or hearing live music, some of this music is dance music—it’s a different experience, one that’s much more enveloping and trance-like than listening to an album, where the sound often feels a lot smaller or thinner. I really like how your albums manage to recreate that effect but through other means, like the way you use Colin’s saxophone, or the layering of sound to get a similar effect through different means.
Yeah, exactly. The things you can’t do live, it’s kind of fun to work with in the studio, but then I feel like when I tour this new album [Sunwise (2025)] I’m going to have to try and make a live version of it, which to a certain extent that’s what I’ll be aiming for anyway.
When you’re working on this album and these tunes, does the studio or live performance come first? Are you working through your arrangements in the studio and later working out how to play them live, or are you already playing these tunes live and then going into the studio to figure out how to arrange them?
It’s a mix of both. I’d say 90% comes from live [performances], especially if it’s a solo track. It might be that I’m playing through my effects and things, or just playing acoustically. If it’s a collaboration it’ll normally happen in the studio or as an overdub, so in that space you then come together and work out live.
When you’re touring for this album, do you play solo or do you have other musicians with you?
I’m playing solo but Shahzad Ismaily is at Big Ears so he’s going to join me for a couple of tracks on my first show.
On some tracks on the album, you have collaborators or multiple tracks of pipe sound. How do you work out a solo version for playing live? Or is that not even an issue because you’ve already been playing these tunes before you ever recorded them?
I’ve only played a couple of them live before. I’m not playing the new album live on this tour but I will after it comes out in June. You’ve had a sneak peak before everyone else (laughter). Most of the tracks are possible live through the effects units I’m using. I haven’t really manipulated any of it in the studio except for the reverb, and for that kind of thing you work closely with the [touring] sound engineer. There are some things where I’m juggling the elements of playing and singing at the same time, or configuring certain elements through the effects, but I’m not going to play that live and say this is going to sound exactly like the album; I’ll make a live version of it. But a lot of it, like “Bog an Lochan,” is totally live. The second track, “A’ Chailleach,” there’s a good bit of layering in that track, so I might have to strip some of that back live, but I’ll be singing and playing at the same time. A lot of it comes from the foundation of playing it live so, it will work out.
The single you released, “Bog an Lochan,” I learned this tune when I was twelve—I grew up around bluegrass and old-time music in Appalachia, but I got really into Scottish fiddle music even though I didn’t know anyone who played it. I would just go buy whatever CDs I could find at a store and learn whatever tunes were on them. One of the early CDs, I think by Bonnie Rideout, I learned every tune from that and it had this one on it. But I don’t know anything more about the history of the tune, what’s your source for it?
Well my source, I initially learned it as a strathspey— (hums the syncopated rhythm).
Yeah, I played it as a strathspey.
Is that the way you play it? That’s the way most people would play it, and it would be played in piping competitions or in, like, Cape Breton or for dancing. So, I have known it for a while, but there is a certain recording of travelers from the Sutherland area of Scotland, and I was working on—well I played for a friend of mine who had done research on their music, and they play it as a reel. So we played that together a couple of years ago, and I just like the drive of it as a reel. I have been playing it the last year live on tour, and I just wanted to hone into that repetitive element and put it through certain effects where it echoes back.
I had never heard it as a reel before, and when I was listening to the album without looking at the track titles I thought, wait, this sounds familiar, but I couldn’t place it until I read what the tune was.
Yeah there’s a few strathspeys that would commonly be played as reels, so I feel like there’s no reason not to try other strathspeys as reels. Some people would play the strathspey and then into the reel.
I learned it as a strathspey leading into a set of reels with “Drowsy Maggie.”
Mmhmm.
Do you have any percussion on your albums? I know I heard you speaking on the, what is it, Enjoy Your Piping! podcast about including finger noise on wood as a sort of percussion element. Is that the only percussion you’ve used on your albums?
It’s all fingers. There’s also some foot tapping, but the more intricate sound comes from the fingers.
I like how it’s subtle, like you can hear it when you listen for it, but it’s mostly a subtle underlining of what’s already going on in the melody.
Yeah.
I know you worked with Colin Stetson again on this album. Are there other collaborators? I haven’t seen a press release yet, I only have the notes for the single.
Yeah so Colin is on the second track [“A’ Chailleach”]. There’s a track with organ, I think that’s track seven [“Duan”] and then the spoken word at the end of track seven is my dad. And my brother is doing a little bit of singing on the last track. But the rest of it is just pipes, all the sound’s from the pipes.
You said your dad [Angus Peter Campbell] wasn’t a musician, but he’s a poet, is that right?
Yeah, so he’s a poet and a writer. Like mainly in Gaelic but he does write in English as well.
The clip [of your father’s voice] that you use on the album, what’s the source of that?
It’s an old rhyme that people used to say at Hogmanay [New Year’s Celebrations]. It’s basically a custom that was done in the Highlands—mainly the Hebrides—on Hogmanay, and it consists of a procession, a disorderly procession, of music, of pipes. They go to each house in the village and knock on the door and say the rhyme. The rhyme is just sort of saying about giving the New Year’s blessing and then talking through the rituals, so it would be like you have to go sunwise, three times sunwise around the house, around the children, and around the women of the house. And then there’s a custom of having a slice of lamb or sheep and it was burned, and you’d put the smoke around the house. So it’s just talking through that custom. It isn’t really done anymore, but it’s a rhyme that everyone would’ve known, like my dad would remember that happening and had snippets of the rhyme in his memory.
So that’s the source of the name of the album, Sunwise.
Yes.
I have an Irish friend—I know him through politics and not music but he’s into folk music, and he mentioned having seen you play before at Palestine solidarity events. Is that right?
Yeah, I’ve played for MAP [Medical Aid for Palestinians] fundraisers in Scotland, yeah.
What are your influences in terms of drone or minimalist type music, or how did you get into that?
So with the drone stuff, it’s kind of a natural place as a piper. You spend your life obsessing over drones, making sure they’re in tune and sounding good. For me, it’s just enhancing the best part of the instrument, really. And luckily drones are having a moment (laughter).
Yeah, for sure. When did you first hear—I mean, I’m assuming that Terry Riley or Steve Reich are influences—when were you first exposed to that tradition?
For The Quietus, an online magazine here, I did a [Baker’s Dozen] feature and I had Steve Reich as one of those. My mom played me that when I was about twelve and it’s always just stayed in my head. It’s like a tape remix, but yeah, there’s something about that repetition that I was drawn to even at that point. I’ve always loved Steve Reich’s music since then. I’ve also been listening to Philip Glass’ organ music. I played one of his pieces called “Two Pages” on the pipes. I might play it—the second show at Big Ears is a smaller venue—
Yeah.
I live in Knoxville, where Big Ears is, so I’m like five miles from there.
Oh really? Yeah, so I was thinking about doing just a more acoustic show there, and I might play the Philip Glass piece.
Yeah, it’s a good place for that, it’s literally a pub. A lot of the folk artists at Big Ears will play a more formal set at another venue and then a more relaxed or improvisational one there. It’s small, though, so it fills up fast.
I’m thinking I’ll just do a more traditional set there, but then also place this Philip Glass piece.
How did you meet Colin Stetson, or get connected to him?
I think it was maybe 2020 or ’21. He got in contact with me to record on a soundtrack he was composing. It was for this NASA documentary [Among The Stars (2021)]. That was just done back and forth remotely, and we were sending some stuff, and at that time I was planning to record Carry Them With Us. I asked him if he would like to collaborate on it. I already loved his music and thought I would love to play with him, so that’s just how it worked out.
I heard you say somewhere that the approach was to use the saxophone as an extension of the pipes or of the drone, and that comes off really well.
That was the thing, we were trying to make it just a blend of one sound. But I think Colin’s instrument works quite well in that way because it has the same frequency as the pipes; we’re able to get some really amazing sounds together.
You say you were trying to make it one blended sound, and when I first heard Carry Them With Us I didn’t know Colin was on it. I started thinking at one point, wait is that a saxophone or just another layer of pipes?
It’s quite an organic natural sound together because we’re both sitting in a similar frequency spot. It always did feel like quite a natural collaboration.
On each of your albums do you have a thematic or central idea that shapes the album as opposed to collections of tunes? Do you conceive of them as a whole in some way that guides how you think of each track?
The new album does more than the other two. My first doesn’t really have a theme, it’s just a collection of tunes that I love, that I loved to play at the time. This album has more of a theme running through it and it’s a collection, it’s like a journey from the start to the end. It is still fairly abstract, but it’s about the elements of wintertime and the mythical aspects of it, the feeling of the cool to turn inward and the customs of the Highlands, the old customs of the wintertime as I said about the Hogmanay customs.
So the beginning is inspired by the Cailleach Bheur, who’s this mythological figure of the winter. She brings in the wintertime with her coming or waking up; it is the start of the wintertime and the bad weather—the frost, the cold, the dark. The beginning of the album is that feeling of the darkness coming in and settling into the return of this Cailleach. And then you’ve got elements of the winter cèilidhs coming together, of being around the fire telling stories—the main time for storytelling would’ve been in the winter. It’s that element of blurring the boundaries between the stories and the reality, of the two things merging together. And then yeah obviously I say the Hogmanay rhyme.
It’s not a straight theme all the way through—it’s not in a particular order—but it’s all these aspects of the wintertime. And I know it’s coming out in June (laughs) but I did write and record it in the winter. So, I suppose if anyone is missing that dark and cold time in June (laughter).
I didn’t know all that while listening to it, but the new album definitely has a more spare or wintry feel to it. And you definitely sense a structure unfolding across the album, where it starts with an extended drone and unfolds into other sounds. It felt like a suite or something composed with the overall structure in mind.
Yeah, that’s kind of the thought of the beginning and the end, and then the parts in the middle are more of the storytelling and the tunes.
Are any of these tracks original compositions, or are they all based on original tunes? What’s the ratio there?
The first track is original, the second one is an original walking song, the third is a traditional song, the fourth track is the reel. And then there’s a traditional jig as well, and the organ piece with the rhyme is original, and the last one is traditional. So yeah, it’s kind of a mix.
I wanna say you’ve done this before, that you mix traditional tunes into original compositions. Do I remember right that on Carry Them With Us you incorporate a field recording into one track. Am I misremembering that?
No, I didn’t use a field recording, do you mean the actual voice of a recording?
Yeah, or I know you have your father on this one, and I was just thinking about the way you blend more traditional sources with original compositions, and then obviously original arrangements.
What I did do on Carry Them With Us is that one track was a traditional reel. We start with that and it turned into us improvising off of that, and then we came back to the traditional reel at the end. So there’s elements of that, of the starting point being a traditional tune and then going off from there.
How long have you been singing? Have you always sang or is that something that came later?
Well, as I say in school we had Gaelic singing, so I feel like I have always sung, but there’s a kind of funny thing when you start to perform and you feel like if you don’t call yourself a singer you won’t sing. I’ve realized in traditional music, but especially in Gaelic culture, it was everyone sang, it didn’t matter if you had a “singer’s voice” or if you were a performer—it was just a natural thing to do is to sing. So I’m kind of trying to have elements of that rather than thinking you have to be a singer to sing these songs. The songs influence me so much that I want to use my voice, and also I think it’s a nice way for people to hear the language as part of the music as well.
Yeah I feel that because in old-time music it’s the same, it’s very common to be playing a tune that is also a song and maybe you’ll sing a verse of it over top and then go back to solo fiddling, but you’re not the “singer” in a band or something, it’s a song where we all know the words so it’s part of it without being the focus.
Yeah exactly.
Well, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about? About the tour or the new album or just anything at all we haven’t covered?
Hm, I’m not sure. Not really, unless there’s anything specific you wanted to know.
Have you toured in the US before?
Not in the US, no.
Oh, so this is going to be your first time.
Yeah my first time. I played a show, like a really small show probably seven years ago when I was part of this piping camp I was teaching at, but yeah this is my first proper solo tour there.
Brìghde Chaimbeul’s new album, Sunwise, is out June 27th on Glitterbeat. The album’s lead single, “Bog an Lochan,” is out now. You can check the dates for Chaimbeul’s first US tour here.
Thank you for reading the 184th issue of Tone Glow. Smallpipes at Big Ears.
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