Brìghde Chaimbeul, Etienne Nillesen

A native of the vast Isle of Skye, situated in the Inner Hebrides, Brìghde Chaimbeul is a musician whose inspiration bears the hallmark of the Gaelic language and culture. A virtuoso of the Scottish smallpipe, an instrument dating back to the 15th century, with its soft timbre, and drones made from reed, she creates and reinvents enchanting melodies, at the crossroads between traditional music and experimental spaces. By opening them up to the most modern, contemporary of drones, her art perpetuates the rich drones of the past, like monoliths standing firm against the wind. If local tradition is to be believed, those that played them sometimes lost all sense of time out on the enchanted hillsides, and thinking that they had only been playing a few minutes, only came back years later.
      Echoing this oral tradition, composer and sound artist Etienne Nillesen makes snare drums into melodic and harmonic instruments. Minute variations in terms of tuning, pressure and points of contact on their skin modulate their resonances, strikes, and their slow, fragile transformations, bringing together the focus of the musician, and those listening, towards one and the same place. Sound, of the sculptural kind, is no longer a matter of rhythm, but that of time of a liminal kind.