Tag: Michael Steele

Should warning be needed, and I would say it isn’t, Buin is largely instrumental, mostly original and intrinsically Gaelic music. Morrison is an accordion player of some note, and is both a member of Uist band, Beinn Lee, and a composer, in the classical Gaelic idiom. To boot, he is a Dr of music, with a PhD in composition, despite still living at home on his croft, raising his livestock. That’s multi-tasking island style, and this, his first solo release, sees him team up with the cream of local talent, for eleven well-crafted tunes, with a number of songs for good measure. The music of the Highlands and Islands is sometimes construed to be wild and magical, but here it tends more toward the haunting and mystical side of the tradition.

With the majority written over the past six or seven years, Morrison has been musing on his connection to place, both as a Gael and as an individual: “I feel it important to understand and convey how Gaels have been fighting both for our right to land on which we can live and feed ourselves, and for our language to be spoken by those who come after us”. Buin translates as Belong.

The album opens with ‘Ionndrainn agus Tilleadh’, or ‘Longing And Returning’, two emotions each and every teuchter has ingrained into them. The two paired tunes start with mournful sweeps of accordion textures, that wash that sense of yearning into the soul. A piano ripples as a fiddle follows the main melody. It is Rory Matheson at the keyboard, and Catriona Price with the bow. Michael Steele drops in his flute and the ensemble is near complete, for this graceful tune, the warm swell of accordion the underlying constant. As it speeds into the second tune, the lower level of Euan Burton’s bass makes itself known, and there is a clarsach tinkling in there too, from Ciorstaidh Beaton. A tremendous start.

A song, next, with the clear purity of Mischa MacPherson breaking through the minimal backdrop of accordion drone, her voice like an icy torrent in early Spring. This is ‘An t-Ionnsachadh’, ‘The Learning’, some spare and sparse piano the only other instrument needed. Based on the old Gaelic saying around young learning being the most beautiful, MacPherson entreats, in her own tongue, the young to sing the old songs and learn together.

‘The Creel’ is a livelier piece and would not be out of place at a formal family ceilidh. Accordion, fiddle, flute and piano are the lead textures, as Matheson provides the rolling rhythmic keyboard syncopations that characterise such gatherings. His scatter of notes become almost jazz-fusion, for a moment, as the tune canters into the second and third constituent tunes, the band all careering in perfect time with him. The striking melancholic timbre of Alasdair MacIlleBhàin’s vocal then rises over Morrison and Matheson’s play, for ‘Na h-Eileanan Falamh’, much as had Macpherson for the earlier song, but with his voice gneissian stone to her mountain stream. With small pipes entering from the half-way mark, from Fionnlagh Mac a’Phiocair, it captures entirely the mood of the subject matter, ‘the Empty Islands’.

‘An Là an Dèidh an Stoirm’ is a tune Morrison wrote in 2005, following a January storm that had claimed the lives, at sea, of a family of five. A plangent air, the low rumble of Morrison’s right hand evokes perfectly the abject inscrutability of the elements. A solo piece, it is a stark reminder of how insignificant we are against them. Sticking with the wet, if of a different kind, ‘Downpour Distillery’ is jauntier, in the sense of life must go on, if tempered by the sometime healing balm provided by local cottage industry, in this case the North Uist distillery. In keeping with that, it bursts then into impromptu sounding puirt-à-beul, the drams clearly lifting the mood. The only non-original song, MacPherson is again the singer.

MacPherson sings again for the plaintive ballad, ‘Chan Innis Mi Lem Bheul’, a lament for and to the loss of so much Hebridean heritage, sung from the stance of the modern day, and directed to long gone forbears, bemoaning, particularly, the loss of language, between even but one generation. As the non-Gaelic speaking son of a mother fluent in that tongue, I can identify strongly the sentiment expressed. Something lighter needed to follow, the brisk hornpipe reels, ‘Cutting The Peat’, provide just that, over two combined tunes. Piano and accordion are the initial sole instrumentation, with Steele, this time on highland pipes, joining for the second.

‘Fàs Ur’ begins with a flickering extended fiddle drone and the shimmer of plucked clarsach strings and tentative piano notes. Accordion strides in stoically and statuesquely, Whilst sounding true to the tradition, it is simultaneously the most experimental track here, as instruments drop in and out, altering the meter and mood of each bar. Burton’s bowed bass provides an anchor for the cadence of the melody to delicately morph into something of swirling nebulosity. Closer to some of the styles of Morrison’s work with Beinn Lee, it is quite the contrast to the rest of the disc.

‘An t-Àite Dham Buin Sinn’ has MacIlleBhàin return, for a song that references ‘The Place We Belong’, which is how it translates. This recurring theme is of deep importance to Morrison, and here he is now offering a greater sense of positivity to the way forward. It becomes positively near spritely for the closing tune, ‘Toraidh na Bliadhna’, as it dances optimistically to the close, underlined and defined by some subtle, yet still enthusiastic snare drum from Rory Grindlay.

Buin is a glorious and gorgeous paean to Morrison’s island home and heritage. It comes with a lavish booklet, containing full notes around each track, and with, where necessary, translation of the Gaelic lyrics into English. Morrison himself has produced the album, which was recorded by Burton and mastered, as so many these albums are, by Nick Cooke. If you have any drop of Gael in you, or are merely Gael-curious, I would cite it as essential.

Seuras Og 

Artist’s website: www.padruigmorrison.weebly.com

‘The Creel’ – the virtual dance band: