Skye-born Brìghde Chaimbeul has taken her chosen instrument, the Scottish smallpipes, into settings that she couldn’t possibly have anticipated when she became fascinated with a neighbour’s practice chanter while still at primary school. From being the youngest ever winner of a Junior Pìobaireachd Prize at piping’s prestigious Northern Meeting and featuring as the lone piper at the Highland Military Tattoo when she was still concentrating on the Highland pipes, Chaimbeul has found herself collaborating with Canadian saxophonist-composer Colin Stetson and American avant-pop singer-songwriter-producer Caroline Polachek. She has even become the smallpipes-playing model for fashion house Dior.

While she’s enjoyed successes, including the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award and enthusiastic receptions at festivals across the world, Chaimbeul has yet to quite capture the sublimely magisterial, mesmerising quality of her live performances on album. This, her third, has passages of brilliance. The rough-hewn, characterful ‘Sguabag/The Sweeper’, where she’s joined by three other pipers, has something of the carousing spirit of The Bothy Band in their early iteration. The more solemn opening track, ‘Dùsgadh/Waking’, gradually becomes gorgeously meditative, although the opening five minutes where we get to appreciate the pipes’ beautifully tuned drones might try some listeners’ patience.

Elsewhere, on shorter tracks, Chaimbeul both delves deeper into the tradition she grew up with and recasts the pipes as tools of arrangement. ‘She Went Astray’ has rhythmical blasts of pipes as accompaniment to her own hushed and confiding Gaelic singing. ‘Duan’ uses the pipes percussively, almost like the chanter equivalent of a guitarist hammering on, as a precursor to her dad’s (the marvellous poet-author Aonghas Phàdraig Chaimbeul) superbly atmospheric intoning of a Hogmanay rhyme. In all, good (even great) in parts, just not as devastatingly alluring as the live experience.

Brìghde Chaimbeul: Sunwise is released by tak:til/Glitterbeat on Friday 27 June; main picture: Jonny Ashworth.