Chaimbeul, Brighde

Brìghde Chaimbeul plays the Scottish smallpipes, a bellows-powered set of bagpipes with a double-note drone. A native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Skye, she began learning the pipes as a young girl and at the age of seventeen won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk award. Her 2019 debut album, The Reeling, produced by Lau's Aidan O'Rourke, won her major media plaudits, five-star reviews, and a BBC Radio 2 Horizon Award, for its fresh reading of traditional Gaelic tunes and outward looking assimilation of influences from Cape Breton, Eastern Europe and Ireland, played with an enticing virtuosic liquidity, emphasising the rich textural drones of the smallpipes. Still just in her early twenties, Brìghde Chaimbeul has established herself among the leading experimental purveyors of Celtic music.