Along with a lot of other reviewers and critics, I was very favorably impressed with Brìghde Chaimbeul’s previous album, her second, Carry Them With Us but this one didn’t immediately click with me. Now that the days are shorter, darker, and colder I’ve started listening to it almost obsessively, which makes sense because Sunwise is a song cycle about the onset of winter. It employs Chaimbeul’s arrangements of some traditional tunes and songs, along with a few composed by her.
“This record follows the embrace of winter time; the closing in of darkness, the cold, the pull to turn inward,” she says in the liner notes. “But also, the customs of the season, and gathering for the ceilidh: songs and stories told round the fire; where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur.”
Brìghde Chaimbeul grew up on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, was a teen piping contest winner, and has blossomed into an artist with her own musical vision and the talent to realize it. She takes her Scottish smallpipes into some new territories drawing on minimalism and trance music utilizing the pipes’ rich textural drones.
In terms of instrumentation Sunwise is more of a solo album than Carry Them With Us, which included a lot of contributions from the Canadian composer and saxophone player Colin Stetson — he’s still here on one track, along with an organist on one and a trio of uilleann pipers on another, along with a Gaelic spoken word piece from Brìghde’s father. But it doesn’t have the stark feel of a solo album, partly because of those collaborators and partly because she sings on some tracks, as does her brother Eòsaph on the final track “The Rain is Wine & The Stones Are Cheese,” a traditional song used to mark the longest and darkest night of the year. It clocks in at exactly one minute, with the two voices seemingly modified by the deep buzzing drone she pulls out of her pipes as the siblings sing in the canntaireachd style that is used to vocalize bagpipe music.
The minimalism is present especially in the opening track, one of Chaimbeul’s compositions “Dùsgadh-Waking.” It’s paired with the song “A’ Chailleach,” and together they represent the waking and walking round of a character from Celtic folklore, the Cailleach Bheurr who was the bringer of winter. “… this is kind of her waking up, roaming the moors with her walking stick, making sure she was getting rid of any greenery that was growing through and keeping that sharp frost in the air,” she explains. The nine-minute “Dùsgadh-Waking” spends about five of those minutes in a steady three-note drone that slowly, slowly opens up into a chilly welcome to the thin, cold sun. Even if you don’t know the folklore behind this one, it functions nicely as a portrayal of awakening from slumber to a new day. The companion song “A’ Chailleach” begins with a repeating circular melody that likewise eventually blossoms into a shimmering tune to which Chaimbeul adds the vocals of a traditional waulking song.
She sings multi-layered and overlapping lines on “She Went Astray,” a traditional song collected in the 1930s, accompanied only by a repeated burst of her drones like a foghorn. The short but lively solo piping tune “Bog an Lochan” brings us to the most traditional piping piece, “Sguabag/The Sweeper,” recorded live with uilleann pipers John McSherry, Francis McIlduff and Jamie Murphy.
I regret that I slept so long on Sunwise, which is a superb album, an innovative melding of traditional song and tune with modern technique and sensibility. It definitely succeeds in its lofty ambition of embodying the mythology of winter and our experience of this turning of the seasons.
(tak:til / Glitterbeat, 2025)
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