FOLK
BY JIM WIRTH
Claire M Singer ★★★★
Gleann Ciùin
TOUCH. CD/DL
Pipe organ drone maestra finds the folk music of the spheres.
For some, the advent of the church organ was the death knell for a lot of indigenous British music, but with those large pipes now as endangered as any folk instrument, Claire M Singer’s third major exploration of the under-explored possibilities of the pipe organ feels extra poignant. Inspired in part by her journeys across her native Aberdeenshire, Gleann Ciùin (Scots Gaelic for “quiet glen”) finds echoes of the eternal in the cavernous sound of her instrument. A hand-whittled version of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking Of The Titanic, it opens with the colossal Turadh (“a break in the clouds”) and keeps gazing upwards, Singer’s evocation of the landscape of the Cairngorms telescoping into a more general, wordless reckoning with the dimensions of time and space. The gaseous hum that underpins the title track could be slo-mo Lankum in dub, the chatter of civilisation stripped back to reveal something more elemental. Wee Tam, meet the big huge.