There comes a time when you just want a single type of instrument to stand up. And also everything that’s composed around and about it. This is the case of The Barbarian Pipe band. Pure bagpipe richness dipped in spices and good to the heart. And the music comes big drums. Of course loud music like this needs something to set the balance.
Be warned. This is loud. For those who expect something sweet and gentle would rather be somewhere else. But if you like your sound loud , hot, kicking and enveloping then Defecatio Imperatrix Mundi is your thing. best played outside with bonfires, friends around and hardcore Celtic partying.
My picks are Ruvida because of its warlike energy amidst its tribal beauty. Those pounding the drums really know how to make your brain heat up with primal appreciation. in Nutri-Ego we get a gong like sound with a little ‘broadcast feed.’ There are other tracks worth noting but I really don’t pay attention to the title because once it starts you just get lost to the sounds. A true charmer o an album for those who want their bagpipes to shine like crazy diamonds!
Bio:
Biography
The booming music of Barbarian Pipe Band overwhelms audiences of all Europe since 2001 (see the band’s CV).
Archaic sounds and modern arrangements solve space and time into powerful trance, wild dancing and deep emotions. Playing on stages, streets, theaters, churches, feasts, motor gatherings, weeding parties, rock festivals these five musicians fit everywhere from medieval-folk to metal-rock contests.
Barbarian Pipe Band propose two types of shows. Amplified or acoustic.
Acoustic show can be on stage or everywhere.
The amplified one has to be on stage and is followed by their own sound engineer.
Both shows may be enriched by live visual performance.
Hello friends. Weekend is here. How are you doing? Life has been hectic here. There’s rain too.Yay!
Ok first of all I want to give a shout out of congratulation to Breton singer/songwriter Dom Duff who released his album today called Babel Pow Wow. A review will follow soon. I love this project because I’ve followed this while it was being created and even sent Dom videos for his use to promote the album. Again if you see this album, have a listen and buy it. It’s really a wonderful effort. Here’s the link about the album: http://www.coop-breizh.fr/cd-et-telechargement-5/telechargements-10/chansons-voix-bretagne-260/cd-dom-duff-babel-pow-wow-5093/zoom-fr.htm
Picture of the day:
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...here’s my view of what will be the biggest crowd of me life … 2000 odd LA downtowners. Onstage in a couple of hours. Supporting Dropkick Murphys and their crazy punk fans! -Andy Slim Black
Here’s an EPK to remind you of this week’s featured band Enter the Haggis
Singer/songwriter Slim took time between gigs to discuss his new album “ Gallows Tree Tales.”
Gallows Tree Tales is an album that will dance around your head for days. I know because I have the album and I play it every day. Whether you are using high quality headphones or huge speakers, this is a must have for audiophiles.
Slim is our artist of the week.This is our second ‘meeting’. I discovered his music a year ago through TradConnect, a social network for lovers of traditional Irish music. He was networking with trad. performers who played on the album. He shared the rough mixes of the tracks to potential fans through his Soundcloud account. Now the album is finished. It promises to please many listeners. Gallows Tree Tales has epic hooks, catchy melodies, and a mastering done with impeccable taste and precision. This is a great addition one’s music library – a timeless album to listen to again and again across generations. Here is our interview.
Slim at last the album Gallows Tree Tales is out! Now tell us about your memorable experiences recording these wonderful tracks.
Yep, the album’s out – after over three years of hard graft, it’s here. There’ve been so many magical experiences, – getting the bones together of the first track I wrote (‘Til My Dying Day), and releasing a rough demo of that to my fans on Facebook, and getting just the most beautiful feedback from it, and realizing right at that very point that this project had LEGS! Also with this project, although I didn’t have a working band when I started it, I really didn’t want it to read like ‘Slim plays all the instruments’ – I wanted it to be a classic folk-rock record, with loads of different artists on board, lots of different sounds and talents.
So as I was developing each song, I was adding session players to the mixes, and before we even get on to the gospel choir, there’s getting on for seven musicians on most of the tracks. Dan Clark plays some beautiful lead guitars, there are some stunning bits of Celtic pipes, flutes, and whistles, some beautiful backing vocals, and since I record everything myself, those ‘lightbulb’ moments when each player started up recording for the first time brought many shivers down my spine – I hope everyone else hears and feels these too.
Tell us about the choir. The choir appeared in the album giving it a gospel feel.
The choir (Singology Gospel Choir) are actually only on one song – ‘Peggy Gordon’ – which was one of the last songs that we cut for the record. It was a dear friend of mine, JR who suggested a gospel choir for that track. Since I’ve been doing the Gallows Tree Tales record for a fair while, I’ve been bouncing rough mixes, sketches and the like off my friends and family for so long – and probably ad nauseum in some cases – to get their take on things. These people should get credits really for all the ‘it needs a middle eight!’ / ‘you can sing that better!’ / ‘let me do some harmony vocals on that one!’ comments that I’ve got over time! Anyhow – Singology are one of my friend Reese Robinson’s community choir that she runs in London. And I just asked if they’d be up for doing a track. Very simple really.
The logistical side was a bit tricky – there were getting on for twenty of them, and my studio’s in the loft conversion in my house in Hackney. So we had the lounge as the green room, where they rehearsed, and then we got them up in groups of three or four to record the parts and sent them down again, while I plied them with pizza, and then we crammed them all into the loft for a final ensemble piece with claps and the works. Toni’s arrangement of the parts was spine tingling, and we doubled everyone’s parts so in effect you have about thirty people singing on the final mix. They graced me with their singing at the launch gig in August at Proud Galleries Camden, and we’re using that video footage to make a promo video which will be stunning. We’ll definitely get them on board for more than one track on the next record – Celtic gospel folk-rock – we’ve invented a new genre I reckon!
The songs are very catchy, adult alternative radio oriented but also very Irish. How did you come up with these songs?
I wanted this record to be like one of the classic seventies rock records. Not just a couple of singles and some filler, but a journey record crammed full of hooks and moments. And I didn’t just hole up in the studio for two months and rush through writing eleven songs, as I’ve had to spend a good chunk of the last three and a half years working (running my home studio, playing session guitar, getting drunk!).
So every song has had to pass through a lot of stages before it made the cut. And I made a conscious effort to give EVERY song a massive hook, a chorus melody that you could sing. ‘Til My Dying Day was the germ of the project, and that came from a great trip to Cork to see some friends back in November 2009, and when I got back to London with Irish airs bouncing around my head (mainly from my mate Donie who’s always singing after a few ales), that kind of informed the whole enterprise.
I got Orlaith McAuliffe and Colman Connolly on the record to give some real Celtic flavours later on which just blew me away – the Uilleann pipes that Colman plays at the start of ‘Til My Dying Day were actually just him checking his tuning and warming up, and it was one of those ‘stop! – we’re using that for the intro!’ moments right away. That first song was like an old yarn that I made up, and I thought, why not do a whole record of tales, which is what we’ve got now. I’m actually as proud of the lyrics as the melodies on this record – I think it all holds together really well.
I like the play of tempo in your track arrangement. The album starts with a ballad then ends with a ballad. In between are energetic tracks that will sure to get people up their feet. Who worked with you in the track order?
Well the last track (‘Reason And Rhyme’) was the first to place. My best mate Jim Gipson wrote the lyrics, and the sentiment of that song is just perfect for the end – ‘We’ve had our time, we’ve had our reason and rhyme’ – a positive break-up tune. I wanted a big Beatlesy singalong chorus to tower off into oblivion, and it’s the only track on the record with a fade-out. We did it live at the launch gig with the choir, with each band member leaving the stage ‘til there was just Singology Gospel Choir onstage singing their hearts out. Perfect.
As for sorting the order of the rest of the tracks, I actually bestowed that honour upon Andy Adams, my drummer. He’s been a tower of strength on this record – I bounce most everything I do off him. He’s fiercely opinionated, and I like people with something to say. So I just told him to go away and order the record, and there you have it. When you’re a solo artist it’s nice to offload some of the weight of responsibility for things!
Your songs have universal appeal. They all talk about the human condition but not confined to personal issues alone. There are also songs about history and places. Was the inclusion of these ideas intentional?
Some of the tales are fictional stories about the usual suspects (love, loss, booze, madness, drugs and the like). Jim Gipson wrote the lyrics to the two most personal love and break-up songs – Heart And Soul, and Reason And Rhyme – he writes in a very direct way, in a style that I don’t, and it’s great to carry that emotional burden for a moment when you’re singing them. There’s actually only one true story there – Cadogan 129, about the very first murder on Britain’s railways in 1864, which is focused on a pub round the corner from me in Hackney, London, which my mate Frank told me about as he lives next door to it.
The great thing about the interweb is once you’ve found a yarn, you can Google it to death, trawl Wikipedia and before you know it you’ve fleshed out a whole web of lives from the past. The middle eight of that song is the actual poem they’d read to the condemned murderer on the day of his hanging, ending with ‘May the lord have mercy on your soul!’, which was a nice touch. I’ll definitely revisit this technique of tale-telling for the next LP.
How do you see yourself 10 years from now as a musician?
In a very similar place to now I’d hope, as I really couldn’t improve upon these Gallows Tree Tales, how we wrote it, how it was recorded, the beautiful people who helped craft it – I’m just so proud of it. I’d definitely like to do more with trad. players from Celtic shores, and more work with the gospel choir, and I think there’s some more acoustic and pastoral places that I could go, but for now, I wanted to make this big, bold, technicolour folk record, that makes you laugh, cry, dance, and who knows what else all at once. I think we nailed it. The big job for the start of the next ten years is getting it out there.
Are you planning an album tour and where?
The next stage is getting this out there so absolutely yeah we’re gonna take this out on the road. London is the focus of course, but the tunes will travel. Definitely we’re talking festivals next summer and hopefully a good support slot or two. I’m gonna get the gospel choir thing rolling too, and the idea of having a collective of musicians that can come in and out and give their flavours. We’ll be doing another big night at Proud Galleries in Camden towards the end of 2012 with a bit more of an industry and press focus, and we’ve got a warm-up on October 7th at the Old Queen’s Head in Islington. Watch this space I guess. I’m off on a road trip from New York to New Orleans in September, so we’ll definitely try for some guerrilla gigs across the pond!
When you are not doing music, what are the other things you are passionate about?
Music’s pretty much the big deal for me – it’s all I do, and what I was born to do. I’ve got about a hundred other projects on the burner at any one time, and don’t devote nearly enough time to any of them. I do balearic electro stuff with one of me best mates Steve Lee (The Project Club), I play guitar with Reese Robinson who runs Singology, and we do kinda nu-soul acoustic tunes. It’s all about collaboration in my book – I met a great MC called Cozmost at Burning Man festival in Nevada last summer, and we’re gonna do a remote hip-hop-folk collaborative thing when I get time. This music thing is really all I live and breathe.
This is the second time we met in this interview and I don’t want to repeat myself. What are the other things you want to tell your listener that you think we haven’t covered yet?
The only thing I have to say to everyone is please get online and buy the record. I’m insanely proud of how Gallows Tree Tales turned out – and it’ll dance around your head for days and days if you let it! So go to www.slim-music.com and get on it, and of course befriend the Facebook band page by ‘liking’ it! www.facebook.com/gallowstreetales. And come and see us live!
Listening to the entire album echoes the passages in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. You travel through the depths of the human experience and you’re purged. Gallows Tree Tales has the larger than life themes that resonate through your soul. You just have to be prepared and you’ll come out of it more human, more honest and healed.
Sampler:
The Gallows Tree artwork courtesy of Slim\s official website
Slim’s band personnel:
Slim – vocals and guitar Andy Adams – drums Benn Cordrey – bass jh – keyboards Sam Kimmins – harmonica and percussion Dan Clark – electric guitar Seb Wesson – electric guitar Emma Bowles – backing vocals The Singology Gospel Choir conducted by Reese Robinson
To buy physical and digital copies (via Itunes) of Slim’s Gallows Tree Tales, get involved, and find out more, visit Slim’s official website www.slim-music.com
Teaser for the rest of the album tracks
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Misc
The Celtic Music Fan would like to greet Baz Mcsherry a Happy birthday. You are now older and wiser Baz! Here you are with your great song:
This teaser came out around May 14 but due to health reasons as well as mixed up schedules, most of my notes and reminders got mixed up with other stuff. Anyway I found them. And oh I got a good news for you fellas. This will become a .com soon. Love it? I think there is credibility when you own a domain.
I know I write articles that you will never ever see in other music sites and yes I have more interviews than other websites run by three or more people and I think it is time to take that asset into good use. I have to admit I am nervous. Before, I used to only think about just writing. Now there will be responsibilities that will come about when this becomes an e magazine devoted to Celtic music.
I want to thank all of you for being with me since 2009. I know I have lost followers and also gained new ones. This would not have been possible without you my beloved readers. For a blogger, the only consolation he has is knowing someone out there reads what he writes. I don’t really generate income out of this but in the future to make this more of a quality site donations will be welcomed.
Irish Rocker based in London has an LP coming soon.
Remember Slim? I wrote about him way back and he is releasing an LP this summer of 2012. This teaser will give you an idea what the whole album sounds like. His music has always been personal and the songs touch your core like no other. In the midst of the rockin’ drums and guitars is a healing bough…he is a wise Celtic rocker beyond his years.
Expect the unexpected. That’s my line for this month while my hands are full due to the season’s madness. There’s no snow from where I am but friends are sending me the chill right now-in a good way. Exchanging gifts are really fun. I stumbled across this info about where exchanging gifts started:
We have many recorded events in history that show the giving and receiving of gifts dates back at least to the 4th century. St. Nicholas, a Christian Bishop, was known for his generosity in giving to those less fortunate than he, as well as giving to children of all backgrounds simply because he felt they needed to savor their childhood, and have joyous times to remember (contrary to the beliefs of that time, which would suggest that boys even as young as 8 be sent to work to help earn income for their families and girls as young as 5 to help their mothers with the housework and meal preparation). The most common gift given were homemade foods and sweets, oranges (this was a huge treat due to the fact they were very rare), handcrafted gifts such as socks, sweaters, dresses, nightgowns, blankets, tables, chairs, and other handmade useful items. This tradition began with St. Nicholas in Turkey. It moved throughout the world very quickly, and before the 10th century is is supposed that nearly every country was participating in this exchange. More here.
Slim sent a link to his new video and I love it. It’s the familiar Slim attitude with a great sense of humor and amazing arrangement. You can’t deny that this video can really make you smile.
“Just a little something I knocked out – thanks to Mel Torme and Bob Wells for penning the most beautiful Christmas song ever, my Canon camera for the ‘color swap’ feature, and French flatmate Alex for the Santa hat). Hope you enjoy the bizarre face-pulling – not sure what happened there….. Merry Christmas everyone. x :o)”-Slim
Taken from the Elysian Dreams album by Shishonnah. Produced by Shishonnah & Roland Labana. Shishonnah are Liz Madden & Jenne Lennon.
Fans of Shishonnah will have something to look forward to. Jenne and I talked over skype about her upcoming projects. This is what I got:
[12/23/2011 5:29:53 AM] Jenne Lennon: Hi there! And merry Christmas to you! Well, things are getting very exciting over at Glencoe/healing sun. Album sales are doing well and the response to the music has been overwhelmingly positive. We are blown away by the response. We are in the midst of the normal licensing and publishing negotiating stages of releasing an album and are working on our 2012 performance schedule which kicks off in Chicago in march. Summer dates will also be announced later, along with several other projects we are working on. So, right now we are preparing to celebrate the holidays. I’m off to Galicia in just a few days. January starts our rehearsals with the back up singers and players so, it looks to be a lovely finish to 2011 and great start of 2013 🙂 Sorry 2012….iPhones!
It is hard to listen to the songs of Andy Black without feeling anything (even if you are a guy who is not into lyrics). He sings about personal experiences. It’s like he is writing your diary then reads it aloud. Any song becomes powerful when you realize that you are living your life in its every line. His voice is raw, cathartic and attractive in a bluesy way. Maybe you are undergoing something powerful and life-changing. Maybe you are just lonely. Maybe you are thinking of a missed soul mate or of things that could never be. Either way his songs will speak to you.
That is why I rank musicians as a different breed. There is something in what they do that gets to you. There are no boundaries. Music can touch you in a way that is so intimate. We live lonely lives. There are the lucky ones who get to find someone that really “gets” them. There are those who are not so lucky. It makes you realize how powerful music is in relating to people and how they connect to it. We need someone to confide with. And if we don’t get that, we look for comfort in a song.
I was having an interesting discussion a friend the other day. There are moments in your life that you can’t understand. Situations that are hard to analyze because they are impossible to define. It takes a really great poet to unravel this for you. Sometimes it can be moments when you accidentally stumble on a song which makes you say: Hey! This is exactly what I am feeling!
I owe this stanza to my friend Christi who discovered it:
“Like a north wind whistlin’ down the sky
I got a song, I got a song
Like the whippoorwill and the baby’s cry
I got a song, I got a song
And I carry it with me and I sing it loud
If it gets me nowhere, I’ll go there proud.”
-Jim Croce
I found a way to let Andy “Slim” Black explain his songs that will be included in his upcoming album. I was glad he was able to get back to me right away despite his touring schedule. For people who are not into Celtic music, they will find something out of these tracks in a personal level. Or you can just enjoy the Irishness of his music.
All the tracks on my soundcloud are gonna be on my forthcoming LP ‘Gallows Tree Tales’ – which will be a collection of stories about all sorts of things, from broken hearts, to alcoholics, crazy love, obsessions, and lunacy, but above all else it’ll be shot through with loads of love, emotion, and a heavy portion of fun!
Sounds like heavy stuff ! Now, “Lay Me Down” is a personal favorite. What’s the inspiration behind this track?
Lay Me Down is a kind of double song – on one level it’s a love song about a fairly unhealthy relationship, and on the other it’s a song sung from an addict to his poison of choice in the vein of Perfect Day or Golden Brown. And it’s meant to be a right laugh at the same time. I’m well proud of the ukulele break on this one!
All of the songs speak to the heart and soul. I tell you man, the first few tracks sent a punch right into my heart. They’re all so true.
Really appreciate your feedback too mate. I’m currently trying to finish a couple more songs at the moment and have just finished a session with a couple of trad Irish players who have added uilleann pipes and flutes and whistles to a few of the tracks on my record which sound just beautiful – you will love.
I’m currently reworking the air to Galway Bay with my own new lyrics – the song will be called The Gallows Tree, and the Celtic thing is all over that.
The plan is to finish this record by the fall – I’m off to USA next month for a month to go to Burning Man festival (in Nevada desert) where I’m actually playing a gig too which’ll be a right laff), and once the record’s done I’ll be getting a band together around it and going gigging.
Wow, Uillean pipes, flutes and whistles sound very Irish! Tell me who are your current Irish favorites and what are the bands you grow up to listening.
I’m not a massive encyclopedia of music history, but I love Luke Kelly for his astounding voice, the Pogues obviously, and Christie Moore for his knack of telling a story. Two English folks that are firmly in this tradition that I also love are Ewan Maccoll for his songwriting, and a current one would be Chris Wood, who did a stunning track called Hollow Point about the Brazilian guy who got shot by the UK government on the tube a few years back… I didn’t grow up listening to any Irish music really – but Mark Knopfler massively informed my childhood – we used to swap Dire Straits records at school when I was 10 years old! He has Celtic blood running through him – and I love Knopfler to bits – he tells great story songs too.
Heart and Soul is another tear jerker. You really write songs that cut straight to the heart. Are these biographical or observations of other people’s relationships?
Heart & Soul is actually the only track I’ve done that I didn’t write. It’s an old song by me best mate Jim Gipson. (www.soundcloud.com/jimgipson) He recorded it a few years back in my studio and it just tore me to bits so I had to cover it. . . . I added a Beatlesy bit at the end which is kinda the outro but apart from that it’s his baby. Yeah that one is a straight direct love song, and not normally the sort of thing I write – well at least not for this project. I guess this album is really a third-person / story song beast in terms of the lyrics. I went to visit some good mates of mine in West Cork a couple of years ago, and one of me mates Donie has a habit of getting drunk and singing all manner of old airs, and when I went back to the UK I had all these airs and melodies bouncing round my head, together with the memories of all the nights I’d spent in pubs listening to all the trad players and old songs, and that’s what sparked off the songs you’re listening to now. I love the Irish / Celtic ways with minor chords and heartbreaking melodies, but just as much as that I love the Irish way of telling stories and tales, and handing them down through the generations, so I wanted to do a kind of storytales record in this spirit. So some tracks are about me or my experiences and some about people / characters I’ve met, and some (like Cadogan 129) are more historical tales – that one’s about the very first murder on Britain’s railways in 1864 very near where I live in Hackney, London).
Celtic Music Fan 