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Music, Science & Nature - Track Stories
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Piper & Professor - Colin Campbell bio
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Featured TV Soundtrack on BBC ALBA - 'Rùrachd' (Foraging)
Loch Bracadale is a special place, a sea loch on the north-west coast of the Isle of Skye, home turf and childhood holiday paradise for award-winning chemistry professor, Colin Campbell of the University of Edinburgh. The loch and its coastline has been shaped by diverse influences over centuries including Vikings, Gaels, Scots and many other new arrivals. 'Westerfjord' - the Viking name for the loch where the 13thC Norwegian King Haakon IV sheltered in the aftermath of the Battle of Largs - likewise melds a bold creative blend at the interface of traditional Scottish and indie music, a place where French café, electronica, and The Clash sit side by side with Gaelic Song and 'Ceòl Mòr' - the classical music of the bagpipes. Blending this all with in-situ field recording, archival sound and data sonification drawing on his scientific background, this album is Colin's love letter to Westerfjord, celebrating a journey of memory through lockdown and a unique corner of Skye that is often overlooked.
The name of the title track comes from the Viking name for Loch Bracadale, and you can still find evidence of their occupation of the area, especially in the myriad Old Norse placenames that still exist, including the family crofting township of Greepe (gnípa - a steep headland with a sheer face). The Vikings famously used Loch Bracadale to shelter after being beaten - as much by weather as by Scottish might - at the Battle of Largs, fought over contested lands in Kintyre and the islands in 1263. The Gaelic lyrics by my cousin Mary Ann link that past with the present and the (relatively) unchanging nature of the landscape, making the comparison between the stricken Viking fleet sheltering in the loch with my personal memories of Greepe and the surrounding area inspiring these tracks, which were written during lockdown in Edinburgh. The male voice at the beginning is my grandfather, James, telling how he and my granny, Mary Ann, came to Greepe from the neighbouring township of Roag in 1936.
This is a more recent story from when we had friends visiting from Seattle and took them to visit Skye. We were walking across the boggy terrain above the huge cliffs near Portnalong at the mouth of Loch Harport, one of the many small sea lochs that make their way inland from Loch Bracadale. The heavy-duty 5/4 rhythms signify our uneven progress along the cliffs until at one point I spotted an eagle. I went across the bog as fast as I could to get to the cliff edge with the eagle nowhere to be seen. Just as I arrived at the top of the cliff, the eagle rose on a thermal right in front of me, looked me right in the eye and flew off into the distance. The 3/4 time of the second section marks the king of the birds' rather more elegant progress, and its majestic presence is also reflected in my friend Robert's pipes, echoed as canntaireachd, the language of pipers, by Mary Ann. I’ve still got the photo somewhere, but I can see the eagle in my mind, clear as day.
Invokes the feeling of our classy flesh-toned Renault 4 arriving at the single track road into Roag and navigating the hills and turns to Greepe, on our way to holiday freedom around the shorelines and hills of my grandparents' croft. We enhanced the track to include archive of my great-uncle Murdo being interviewed by Ian Fraser of the Scottish Place-Name Survey as they and my grandfather James worked their way around the OS maps of the area, giving Gaelic names of every outcrop, water source, inlet, skerry, glen and hilltop. You can also hear my bike and the sound of my kids and my cousin playing in the sea at Bharcasaig as producer Nick and I were engaged in the serious work of fishing for hydrophonics and beachcombing for new musical instruments.
A musical telling of a story about going to the beach at Bharcasaig. The track features the voice of Gaelic singer Kirsteen Graham, who also has family ties to Bharcasaig, which lies across from Greepe on the far side of Loch Bharcasaig, beneath the hills known as MacLeod's Tables (see 'Table Music'). Kirsteen likewise has great memories of visiting there as a child which chime with my own recollections of beach adventures along the black volcanic sands. The track features a suitably laconic, dreamy solo from accordionist Neil Sutcliffe and the hydrophonic recordings we made out on a canoe on the loch where I would have gone mackerel fishing as a kid. Meanwhile you can also hear my own kids on shore,becoming the next generation to hold Bharcasaig in their imaginations as a special place to explore.
A story of the burn (stream) that comes down from Macleod’s Tables, two iconic flat-topped hills named for the ingenious way in which a MacLeod chief once saved face before the king. Known in Gaelic by their Norse-rooted name of Healabhal Mhòr and Healabhal Bheag, the 16thC Alasdair Crotach, 8th chief of the MacLeods, is said to have boasted at a court banquet held by King James V of Scotland that he had a grander table and brighter lights than any the king could offer. His solution to having to prove his point was to invite the king and his guests to to a banquet on the top of Healabhal Mhòr, torchlit on their way to the summit by his MacLeod clansmen. The burn lyric of the in the song is a metaphor for all the peopIe who have come and gone from the area, including ourselves as we sadly no longer have a family connection to the croft in Greepe - all our field recordings were carried out while staying in a delightfully idiosyncratic cottage in Vatten, overlooking Roag and Greepe. Maybe it was best that way. Tying in with the flow of people, I sonified the protein sequence of haemoglobin (the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body) to make the soundscape at the beginning and end of the track.
It rains a lot in Skye, even in the summer. Even though we spent a lot of the holidays in full waterproofs and wellies, some days would be spent at the kitchen table playing cards. Our seanair - grandfather James - was a demon card-player too, except on Sundays. Sitting in the kitchen of the little cottage in Vatten where we were based for field recordings, producer Nick, cousin Mary Ann, myself and the kids recorded in situ as we tried to recreate some of the Greepe kitchen atmosphere of another time, blending it with Radio nan Gàidheal and a little something jazzy to go with the idea of playing cards, and the same traditional respect for the rules of the game...
Shearing sheep was a highlight of any summer holiday and even little kids could contribute to the big community effort. A fank is the walled enclosure that was used to corral sheep for shearing, dipping etc. The name of the track comes from a pun that my dad once used. He had been a shepherd as a young man and told me that “catching sheep on an open hill is a fankless task”. Definitely a ‘dad joke’. The music is trying to convey the fun of rounding up sheep and bringing them in for shearing. Mary Ann reminded me that the girls weren't so lucky, being corralled in the kitchen themselves. Sounds at the beginning and in the middle of the track were recorded from various sources at Bharcasaig Bay, including a yacht’s mast, cement mixer and empty storage drum. You can still see the remains of the big fank and its dry stone walls, much overgrown and no longer in use.
Inspired by the emigrants who left Loch Bracadale, particularly my dad, Calum John, who went to work on ferries in the Clyde after he met my mum, Jean. The original words by my cousin, Mary Ann, are in the style of many a Gaelic song of ‘cianalas’ or longing for home. 'Bithibh a' smaoineachadh orm a là 's a dh'oidhch, 's mi seòladh null thar sàil' - think of me night and day as I sail the ocean.
During rationing my grandfather and his brother had a boat and helped supplement the kitchen table by catching fish and shellfish. My auntie Ann would often tell me that they’d come home from school, ask what was for dinner and roll their eyes at the prospect of having to eat lobster again! The audio is my grandfather’s brother - my great-uncle Murdo - participating in the Scottish Place Name Survey in 1968, and a hydrophonic recording from Loch Bracadale which is dominated by the sound of pistol shrimps - Alpheidae - a very small member of the lobster family. Its pistol-like joint arrangement of the larger of two claws allows it to create a high-pressure bubble which it uses to stun its prey. The distinctive 'crack' is one of the loudest natural sounds in the ocean.
Early in the 2000s I was surprised to find a plantation of native woodland on the trail between Bharcasaig and Macleod’s Maidens, called Rebel’s Wood. It had been planted in honour of Joe Strummer of the Clash whose grandmother was a Gillies from Raasay. The connection between Loch Bracadale and Joe Strummer was like the collision of two worlds that I thought were unconnected. The tune is in the style of a pìobaireachd (the classical music of the bagpipe) with a guitar backing as a nod to Joe Strummer. While doing the fieldwork for the album I cycled from Struan round the loch, abandoning my bike at Rebel’s Wood and carrying on running out to The Maidens. We used my heart rate data converted to sound at the beginning of the track and altitude data converted to sound in the middle. The words are from ‘Òran a’ Chriosamas Tree’ - a comic song, ‘The Christmas Tree’ by Donald ‘Ruadh’ Campbell and recited by my auntie, Gaelic singer and activist Kenna Campbell.
My uncle Alasdair and his brother, Donald, both retired to Camustianavaig in central Skye where they’d been born and brought up. They owned a little boat together and put a herring net out in the bay to try to catch salmon (not very practical and highly illegal). One day my brother, Graham, and I spotted a float down on the net, suggesting there was something big in it, and seal cruising around nearby. My uncle’s brother tried to scare the seal by discharging a shotgun into the air (not in the direction of the seal) and we all made a beeline for the boat. Out at the net we found a salmon being held in the net by a gill and when my uncle tried to get it into the boat it slipped between his fingers onto the bottom of the bay. The water’s not that deep and my brother Graham ran up to the house to get a long fishing rod that we rigged with a bit of wire to make a 15ft gaff. As we pulled the fish into the boat and headed for shore, we saw the local policeman waiting for us. We carefully put the salmon in the front of the boat and covered it with my brother’s jumper. Being local, the policeman knew my uncle (also a very senior ex-polis!) and his brother, and I’m sure that he didn’t believe any of our stories about fishing for mackerel or scaring crows away from the lambs with a shotgun. He did leave us with the suggestion that we might want to be more careful with the gun since it was mostly the tourists that it was scaring. And that we might want a shorter rod for boat-fishing. This track recreates the underwater scene beneath the mayhem.
The crashing guitars, idiosyncratic time signature and wailing fiddle in the music represent a storm, which are many and often spectacular on the loch, with the waterfalls on the opposite side of Loch Bharcasaig being blown upwards into the air. The words are from the poem ‘Blashy Wadder’ by Jen Hadfield about one such storm in Loch Bracadale and which wonderfully evokes the scenes of the loch in bad weather. The music incorporates an archive recording of my grandfather, James, singing and the poem was recited by my auntie Kenna. "At dusk I walked to the post box, and the storm that must have passed you earlier today skirled long, loose ropes of hail between my feet. And I crackled in my waterproof like a roasting rack of lamb."
Partly recorded on the beach at Greepe head - all sea and bird sounds completely in situ as they appeared on the recording of the original guitar track down on the shore. The composition stems from the point during lockdown when we had planned to go to Skye over the Christmas break and then the travel ban came into place. The rain battering off the window in our house brought me back to the many rainy days I spent on that beach – I was trying to recreate the serenity of being at the beach in the rain.
Skye is full of legends about Kelpies (malicious horses from the sea who could take on human form and charm locals to their death). The legend is that to protect yourself from a Kelpie you just have to cross running water – as a kid I didn’t find this particularly reassuring as the Kelpie could go back in the sea and avoid the running water. So, I updated the legend with the notion that the reason you’ll rarely visit a west coast beach without seeing a piece of blue nylon rope is because it’s like kryptonite to Kelpies. I took the Raman spectrum of a piece of blue nylon rope from the beach at Greepe, turned it into sound and incorporated it in the middle section. Raman Spectroscopy is an analytical technique that uses scattered light to measure a sample's vibrational energy modes. Raman scattering provides chemical and structural information which identifies substances via their unique Raman 'fingerprint'.
I didn’t get a driving licence until I was in my thirties and the last time I saw my grandfather alive, I had taken the bus to Portree, stayed in a hostel and then rented a bike the next day to cross the island and visit him in Greepe, no small journey. I was telling him how I’d recently walked across Spain after finishing my PhD, which led him to tell me about his time in the merchant navy where he sailed to Gibraltar and piped the crew ashore. I had never heard this story before - in facy I hadn’t even known that he had travelled as far as the Mediterranean. Most of the stories we had heard were of being stationed in the Faroes with the Lovat Scouts, and being posted to Uist where he communed with fellow Gaels, but also with his beloved horses. The main chord sequence throughout the track is based on an Andalucian cadence - a 'walking down' chord sequence of Am-G-F-E- that gives it a bit of a Spanish groove and the brilliant trumpet solo from Colin Steele makes it feel like the end of a Spaghetti Western.
Guitars and Bass - Colin Campbell, Ken Donaldson, Nick Turner * Pipes and Whistles - Robert Gray * Strings - Ewen Henderson * Accordion - Neil Sutcliffe * Brass - Colin Steele, Marcus Britton * Drums - James Mackintosh * Vocals - Mary Ann Kennedy, Kenna Campbell
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For all enquiries on Prof Colin Campbell & the Westerfjord project: Email: colin.campbell@ed.ac.uk For all enquiries on Watercolour Music & the Westerfjord project: Email: mak@watercolourmusic.co.uk
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