Under the nave of Glasgow’s Mackintosh Queen’s Cross church, among the dissonant wails of strings and brass being tuned, Brìghde Chaimbeul is trying to find us a quiet room to chat. The journey is meandering as she’s stopped by numerous tech staff, fellow musicians and promoters calling ‘hello Brìghde! Good to see you!’ from in and around the chancel. It’s the last weekend of Celtic Connections and Chaimbeul is in Glasgow to perform a new composition by Linda Buckley with the Maxwell Quartet; this is a homecoming of sorts for the already revered musician, now based in Northern Ireland.

Despite only being in her mid-20s, Chaimbeul has been a force on the Scottish trad music scene for the best part of eight years, ever since winning BBC Radio 2’s Young Folk Award at the age of 17. The piece she’s performing this evening, titled ‘Thar Farraige (Over Sea)’, was written especially for a string quartet and Scottish small pipes, the instrument Chaimbeul has come to redefine on stage and in her three critically acclaimed albums. To give you a sense of how her peers perceive her, one Maxwell Quartet member labelled her ‘small pipes, big brains’. 

Chaimbeul’s instrument, in contrast to traditional Scottish bagpipes, is entirely blown by bellows (meaning there’s no additional air being produced orally) and has three drones that sustain underneath whatever notes are played on the chanter. ‘A drone is that constant note, so everything is against that,’ she explains, once we finally discover an empty room. ‘There’s tension and release all the time because that note doesn’t move. But then you’ve got the frequencies which echo from the drone. If everything’s really in tune and the frequencies are in a nice acoustic, you can physically feel that buzz as you play.’

Chaimbeul grew up on the Isle Of Skye where weekly Gaelic song classes and specialist pipes, harp, fiddle and cello teachers were the norm at her primary school. ‘It was a time where there was Highland Council funding there, so actually a lot of my generation from Skye got that music education.’ While most of her schooling was in English, at home Gaelic culture and language prevailed. 

Largely disengaged with mainstream culture, she grew up listening to Gaelic acts such as James Graham and Cliar. How, then, did she find herself playing on one of the most critically acclaimed alt-pop records of last year and joining the artist in question, Caroline Polachek, on stage at Glastonbury? ‘She had been listening to The Reeling [Chaimbeul’s 2019 debut album] and I guess she just liked the sound of my pipes and wanted them on her album. I didn’t know her before I worked with her but I’m a big fan now,’ she says with a giggle. While The Reeling was inspired by Chaimbeul’s explorations of international piping traditions from Bulgaria, Spain and France, her latest album is far more grounded in the Highlands and Western Isles. ‘I think there’s probably something in looking outwards to then go back to where you’re from. It happens a lot,’ she reflects. We needn’t look further than the title of that latest record, Carry Them With Us, to see the inspiration she’s taken from home.

‘My dad [Scottish poet Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul] is from South Uist and there’s a storyteller we knew from there called Iain Sheonaidh Smus. When I was younger, if someone wanted to hear a particular story and he didn’t want to tell it at that time, he would say “I haven’t carried it with me today”. That’s a literal translation of the Gaelic phrase, but I just liked the idea that he carries the stories and the songs, rather than saying “I don’t want to”.’

Dipping into the School Of Scottish Studies Archives in Edinburgh, Chaimbeul discovered a treasure trove of stories that acted as building blocks for the album. ‘Storytelling is very much part of Gaelic culture, and it’s something that is overlooked a lot of the time. Back in the day, you would go to someone’s house to hear a story, but there’s a possibility of them being totally forgotten. And a lot of them have been, apart from the ones that were recorded.’ 

Made in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Colin Stetson (composer of soundtracks to films such as Hereditary and The Menu), Carry Them With Us has a darker and more experimental quality than Chaimbeul’s previous work. She recalls first meeting Stetson when working remotely on the score of Disney’s Among The Stars documentary: ‘I sent him some music that I was working on just to get his thoughts. And then when he sent it back, he had recorded this stuff over it. That was the first moment I got an idea of how we would sound together and I loved it.’

This prompted the two musicians to meet in-person for the first time and record most of the record together. Despite the album’s expansive soundscape and occasional electronic-sounding complexity, all of the parts were recorded with organic woodwind instruments, harmonium, vocals, and, of course, Chaimbeul’s pipes. ‘Colin sounds like ten instruments at once,’ says Chaimbeul, a reality she’s having to work around for her solo shows. ‘I’ve adapted parts so that I’m able to play it solo using electronics, which is a new thing for me. It’s very subtle the way I’m using it. You might not necessarily know it’s electronic if you don’t see it, but I’m kind of interacting with it as though it’s someone else I’m playing with.’ 

A string of tour dates across the UK marks an exciting new venture for Chaimbeul who, despite being a seasoned live performer, finds that touring on her own comes with ‘ups and downs. It’s changing your mindset of “it’s just me” to “it’s me and the pipes, it’s me and the three drones and the chanter and the unit that’s adding delay or adding a base drone”, and all these extra things. Coming up with this show has been such a special process.’
Brìghde Chaimbeul plays across the UK, Tuesday 23 April–Sunday 9 June.