After the remarkable success and acclaim that greeted her second album Carry Them With Us (tak:til / Glitterbeat, 2023), Scottish composer and small pipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul returns with a magic(k)al third album, Sunwise, which sees her push forward experimentally but also immerse her music more deeply in tradition, folklore and mystery.

Chaimbeul has travelled in a short time from her roots as a teenage piping contest winner into a fearless, widescreen artistry. She appeared on avant-pop paragon Caroline Polachek's last album, has collaborated with Canadian composer/saxophonist Colin Stetson on her previous album (and this one also) and in the last couple of years has graced the stages of premier experimental festivals such as Big Ears (US), Le Guess Who? (NL) and Supersonic (UK). Sunwise is a revelatory album, steeped in landscape, ritual, minimalism and the eternal presence of the drone. This record follows the embrace of winter time; the closing in of darkness, the cold, the pull to turn inward. 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.’ 

Thus, Brìghde Chaimbeul introduces her third album, a release which comes after two years of incredible acclaim for its predecessor Carry Them With Us, which won awards from such diverse places as The Guardian (Best Folk Album Of 2023 #7) and The Quietus (Best Albums of 2023 #13). Since that album, she has played stages from Tennessee to Denmark, often far outside the traditional / folk circuit where she first made her name, and often playing for audiences who’d never seen someone play small pipes before. To appear alone on the main stage at last year’s Supersonic Festival in Birmingham and reduce a hungover festival crowd to rapt silence probably isn’t what Chaimbeul expected, and nor would she have expected to be hailed as leading a revival of interest in an instrument that was arguably fading into obscurity.