Episode 199

Tabs Out | Excursions in Bagpipe Droning: Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats & Carme López – Quintela

Excursions in Bagpipe Droning: Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats & Carme López – Quintela

8.07.24 by Matty McPherson

It takes 2 tapes to denote a comparison, 3 to draw a pattern, perhaps trend. You can cheat with the right Bandcamp primer, enough to make a compelling case that perhaps there always was something here. While a 2024 guide to Celtic Fusion perhaps invites you to consider the dance fusion aspects new remixes atop pastiche (bordering into zones best described as “Awful Taste but GREAT Execution” style music), this 2022 guide to Experimental Bag Pipes has been something of a boon when considering two tapes that have been haunting the last 4+ months of my digital drive & hifi.

As we encroach the halfway point of summer, I’m still returning to the works of Harry Gorski-Brown (Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats) & Carme López (Quintela). I was drawn easily to both of these because they happen to reflect the a certain strain of Bandcamp tape goodness: composer-style works out on the fringe on the private press, the ones where New Approaches to Music are woven directly into sound. Anachronistic in a way that pushes forward, as much as a terminally sold out (both of them are); designing pathways under explored and without champion. We’re on another ocean mulling these over. Creativity, is not something that can be birthed, but comes from practice and wrestling with personal knowledge into constant shapeshifting forms. And Gorski-Brown and López provide parallel, if somewhat contrasting, creative approaches to the bagpipe in 2024 as an instrument in avant-recording. Neither of which you can understate the fearlessness of.

Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats is a lot of things at once. We’ll start with acknowledging that GLARC put this out. The Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Resarch Council has been a slow, yet steady entity out in Glasgow for the past 8 years. They consistently tag themselves as Reserach & Sound Art for good reason. There’s a lot of releases merging the didactic, like Max Syedtollan/ Plus-Minus Ensemble’s Four Assignments (& Other Pieces)’s narrative based composer works, with physicality, like han’s The Institute of Ecoterrorism’s latex cover and conceptual focus on a fictional Institute of Ecoterrorism. These are heady releases, unique and emphasizing the best of what you can do with a tape this decade. Look further, there’s the result of workshops for kids, consistent lo-fi and jammy ruminations, hell even Still House Plants’ first cult release(s) kicked off the label (and now fetch triple figures). Essays and smells and well, a real sense of community commentary and curiosity abound into one of the most notable backcatalogs across the pond.

Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats

While Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats does not come with a bonus aesthetic treat or materialistic flair, it is one of the label’s longest releases and conceptual airtight. “Put together by Harry Górski-Brown (voice, pipes, fiddle, organ, bouzouki, electronics). Songs from a long time ago sourced from various places” is all that’s indicated on the releases Bandcamp page, the sole embodiment of where these 8 tracks on this ~C64, live digitally. Perhaps in a state slightly improved from the home dub of the GLARC tape. But maybe that’s essential to the whole thing, for Górski-Brown is nothing but conversant in the Scottish Folk Song, and diligent in a 21st century mode for presenting the form, even in obvstentively lo-fidelity live takes and DAW touchups. Yet, preserved in this wobbly, archaic way it is anachronism encroaching meta.

Górski-Brown’s approach to bagpipes is something that many could easily find themselves on board with. Òrain Ghàidhlig and Pìobaireachd are termslikely not encountered outside of a library’s limited Scottish music section (or RYM tags for releases like this or in Bandcamp primers), if at all before this tape. Yet, those Scottish traditions are quick to become a reliant foreground brimming with an expanse for Gorski-Brown, especially if you love drone or electro-acoustic touch ups that he integrates and suddenly brings this to the 2020s with such viscosity. The traditional songs make for a rather entrancing drone medley, one that embodies naturalism akin to crystalline ponds after rain showers, and matches with the most folk-oriented releases in the primer. Yet, Górski-Brown traverses that sound with the kind of sprawling intensity of Joe Rainey’s Niineta (perhaps the album’s truest ancillary), especially when he gets on the microphone to vocalize and try to find a balance to harmonize with the pipes.

It’s here where with the digital effects, he finds a similar way to give us a sonic roadmap of where he’s been; hagged noise glitches, choir augmentations, modulations in the voice. They can change the general intensity of these slow encumbering drones, approaching sublime depth and finding new emotional intensity within the bagpipe (as an instrument and addition to the voice) while also suggesting new characteristics of this land and what it means to Gorski-Brown. These songs beckoned to me not because they lurked, but those shadows sometimes reminded me of a strain of digital/daw-gaze coming out of the late end of another strain of online pop/bitcrushed musics, which is not something I anticipated when I first heard this release at all in February. It’s why the monstrous length and commitment to this made for an interesting set of observations in Tone Glow. I err with the high marks ecause his emotion is nothing but on the sleeve across this release (the penultimate cut’s harmony of Górski-Browns is a particularly rousing fist pumping anthem), whether its in the abrasive quality a drone can take (at the end of Side A or Side B’s closer) or the utter gumption it takes to close with an “encore” of I wanna fight your father. Taken from a live show, everything that Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats embodies comes together here, even down to the fact that Górski-Brown seems to cough and stutter for a second and the crowd beckons on. This shit is too home-spun not to hear a tantalizing idea within.

Carme López – Quintela

Both tapes have portraits of their performers. Yet, while Górski-Brown looks straight at us, Carme López looks to the left. Is it a sly nod suggesting her roots researching and studying traditional oral music? Or is it looking back at the 20th Century notion of Deep Listening? The music on Quintela seems to suggest both as necessities to rip it up and start anew with the bagpipe. For López, a teacher and performer, the bagpipe, gaita gallega, is also something that does not have to be played akin to the way it has been presented. Quintela’s Bandcamp notes indicate that desire to position the instrument away from masculine modes, towards something more playful and spontaneous. Still conveying a folk tradition, albeit one more nuanced and personalized. Warm Winters Ltd. is something of an outpost for these global happenings (and along with Muscut & Mappa, deserve great credit for documenting a new environmentalism and futurism in European music, especially in the east)

Her approach is especially noteworthy for the passages of silence she blesses the tape, the atonal mania the bagpipe can achieve, and the micro-blissouts her drones work towards. Whereas Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats felt akin to a meaty mixtape, Quintela has structured form to its track listing, a featherweight journey across four parts; a tidier ~C40. In addition, its traditional prologue and epilogue that allow López to present dextrous skill, while also being the tape’s most concurrent passages with Górski-Brown. Quickly we move to I: QUÉ? A Betty Chaos, repositioning the bagpipe towards both the most atmospheric and dread inducing. The track, built from air passing through the bagpipe’s hide bag, recalls the noir haze of Astral Spirits free noise and the tinkering of Tripticks Tapes experimenters like Weston Olencki & Nat Baldwin–folks whose approaches to terraforming an instrument to find a new kind of relation to its forms and history parallel that of López. Anything and everything can be used with the instrument, a reckoning that allows López to convey analog wit towards the instrument and remap its folk capacity.

It is the tapes middle though, where this tinkering merges with the avant. The awe-inspiring II: MATICOLO. Aos cans da casa: Piri, Sil, Duma e Mouri is where Carme López achieves a bliss out, with a frequency cutting truly out of time. She’s taken influence from Pauline Oliveros and Éliane Radigue’s work with drones, yet my ears detect a significant flavor between La Monte Young and Time Machines. For nine minutes, she motions a gentle frequency that’s ever pulsating, a bass node gently expanding, to the moment to a point where the passage of time slips away. You could easily be lulled to a slumber until the click indicates the end of Side A. Side B opens with III: AVÓS. A Pepe e Manuela, a culmination that moves the drone to its most liturgical, reverent state. IV. CACHELOS. A César de Farbán then sees a mending of the first piece’s tinkering & the middle two’s droning. Dutiful tapping of reeds of the bagpipe concoct percussive quip, somewhere between the flicker of a switch, a tap shoe, and a water droplet being sampled. Improvisational ambient dub seems too aspirational a label, but her style of playing those reeds reminds me of those drum rhythms as much as toying with lincoln logs or throwing rocks in a pond. Even in an analog way, López achieves something that can feel distinctly goo age, although not hyperrealistic; an invitation to explore and find a personal noise, but from something ancient, not created. Its an energy the traditional Inflorescencia epilogue indicates that López’s further exploration into the unknown is only just coming into fruition.

For as much as both releases feel attuned to aesthetic technological the advancements of the 20th century, neither release feels like they could have a home on the ECM New Series or New Albion, let alone Lovely Music Ltd. or a Rough Guide to Gaelic Highlife in that time. I mean it half-jokingly, but what does that mean to me really? For a tape like Quintela, which is a disciple of deep listening, why is its final fourth so playful and suggestive of minimal electronic experiments that I’ve found Keith Rankin’s “goo age” so helpful to denote? Whereas with Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats, how come an integration of electronics allows these folk songs to become a manner of sonic roadmapping not present on Quintela without that kind of playful character? The fact that in 2024, you have two tapes of this quality working with the bagpipe in ways that so rarely clash, just barely concur, strikes me as a sign of just how much we have to learn and how easy it is to diverge in novel ways. Go forth and bring a new aesthetic approach or set of limits and hypotheses. But please, no more trance beats and bagpipe in poor taste, we’ve have enough to last a lifetime.

Both Releases Sold Out at GLARC & Warm Winters Ltd Bandcamp!

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