Brìghde Chaimbeul

Brìghde Chaimbeul (born 1998) is a Scottish piper from the Isle of Skye who has turned the Scottish smallpipes — a bellows-blown, softer-voiced relative of the Great Highland bagpipe — into a vehicle for something that sounds simultaneously ancient and genuinely new. A native Gaelic speaker raised in a family of artists (her father is the writer Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul, her mother a sculptor, her sisters harpists), she won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award at seventeen and the BBC Horizon Award three years later. Her arranging method foregrounds the instrument's layered drones over melody, producing a trance-like constancy that draws as much from ambient and avant-garde music as from the piping traditions of Scotland, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Cape Breton. Three albums trace the arc: The Reeling (2019), the Colin Stetson collaboration Carry Them With Us (2023), and Sunwise (2025), each pushing further from the folk circuit into festival stages from Utrecht to Chicago. She has also appeared as a soloist on Caroline Polachek's 2023 record Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.