O'Neill's compositions for bagpipes and percussion display a wide variety of moods and are far from academic.

Vancouver-based Michael O'Neill is a classically trained composer and pianist who was drawn as a youth to the highland pipes and has been playing them ever since. He has also been involved since the 1980s in composing and performing works for Javanese and Balinese gamelan as a member of Gamelan Madu Sari and leader of his own groups. This record however features his compositions for up to 4 bagpipes and various percussion instruments, interpreted by his piping group Mearingstone and contemporary taiko group Uzume Taiko.

Within the apparently restricted expressive range of the bagpipes O'Neill has brought forth a wide variety of moods, the results of a passionate response to the unrealized potential of a deep tradition. For all their structural sophistication these are far from academic works. The longest, 'Being and Doing' is a multi-sectional 30-minute composition partly inspired by Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme', a grounded yet ecstatic musical meditation on life and death, and the kind of direct experience of duration, stasis and change that only music can provide. 'Luffness' is a collaborative piece for pipes and taiko (plus shakuhachi and didjeridu) that grew out of an image suggested by Scottish musician Phil Cunningham to Uzume in a bar in Aberdeen: a pipe band and a taiko group encountering each other on a misty moor. A piping innovation here is the lowered drone note, creating a major scale by means of extensions to the drone pipes.' Other pieces were inspired by a blustery days sailing near Vancouver ('Jedaya') and Philip Glass's music ('Horse of a Different Colour').

24/88.2 recording mixed to stereo and 5.0.

Track Listing

• Being & Doing (1. A Walk Supreme; 2. Migration of a Triad; 3. Ontophony; 4. The Shiftings; 5. Astralis; 6. Ogdoadic Zone; 7. Re-entry)
• Luffness
• Jedaya
• Horse of a Different Colour

Additional Details

Label: Songlines

Genre: World

Run Time: 67 mins

Release Date: 10/10/06

UPC: 774355240526