Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 27 March 2008, and touring

Lau

EVEN AMONG the admirable diversity and internationalism of the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune Up music touring programme, it says much that the current season’s most hotly anticipated line-up comprises two Scottish trios, armed with entirely traditional instrumentation, each making some of the most exciting new music you’ll hear anywhere.

On the tour’s second night out, the young piping double-act of Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson, flanked by Ali Hutton on guitar, hit the ground at a positive sprint, setting about the three Irish reels that also open their recent debut album, Partners in Crime, with voracious appetite and breathtaking high-speed accuracy, eliciting an instant storm of applause.

Expanding on the tunes in myriad melodic and rhythmic variations, embellished further by dazzlingly intricate ornamentation, the marriage of Border and uilleann pipes seemed truly a match made in musical heaven, achieving a kaleidoscopic range of tone and texture – including, in Henderson’s case, all the chordal possibilities of his drones and regulators – that wholly belied the constraints of the Scottish pipes’ nine-note scale.

Ainslie and Henderson took their time about making Partners in Crime, and their material richly exemplified the virtues of a slow maturation, as they delved fearlessly into the tunes’ innermost workings, batting motifs and riffs back and forth, attacking the music with a wildness underpinned by awesome technical prowess and telepathic mutual attunement.

Possibly adding yet more exhilaration to the proceedings was the fact that Henderson – currently a third-year medical student at Aberdeen University – had heard just before the tour that he’d passed all his latest exams, and so won’t have to be studying for resits on the bus.

Mixing their own compositions with others by the likes of Gordon Duncan and R.S. MacDonald, plus a few traditional choices, the pair varied the bagpipe blend with some fine playing on various sizes of low whistle, skilfully complemented throughout by Hutton’s taut, agile grooves and melodious picking. There was also the added treat, on a couple of numbers, of some hip-hop style beatboxing from local pal Ruraidh Sutherland, a rhythmic encounter across dance-music cultures that found fertile common ground.

The Edinburgh-based threesome Lau – fiddler Aidan O’Rourke, accordionist Martin Green and singer-guitarist Kris Drever – are currently carrying all before them, storming even the notoriously impenetrable bastion of the English folk establishment (when it comes to instrumental-based Scottish acts) and carrying off the coveted Best Group trophy at February’s Radio 2 Folk Awards in London. They too specialise in deconstructing and reconfiguring a tune until its own author would scarcely recognise it – except that Lau write all their own material, with plenty of scope for that kind of mischief built in.

Looking the very picture of a band on a roll, at times they sounded like an experimental jazz outfit, at others like a classical chamber ensemble, but mostly they sounded like no one but themselves, building a magnificent, mesmerising wall of sound that seethed with restless, rigorous creativity. The impression was often of two or three different time-signatures simultaneously in play, somehow dovetailing amidst the dense warp and weft of melody, counterpoint, harmony and dissonance, anchored by the heavyweight rhythmic partnership between Drever and Green, and crowned with heart-stopping lyrical splendour.

The Edinburgh date was one of a few on the tour featuring visual projections inspired by Lau’s music, courtesy of the production crew 25th Century VJs, who mixed live footage of the performance with a stream of evocative, often semi-abstract images. It’s a new collaboration, and still something of a work in progress, but here certainly added a potent extra dimension to the show.

It is traditional on these double-bill tours to round things off with both acts piling onstage for a lighthearted session-style finale, but Lau et al once again went one better, having rehearsed three new sets specifically as a six-piece. It was a fitting climax not only for the thrill of hearing their united sound, but also for the very fact that it didn’t quite scale the musical heights of its component trios, thereby reaffirming the less-is-more magic of each one’s distinctive triangular synergy.

Reinventing the Reel visits Resolis Community Arts (29 March), Perth Theatre (31 March), Aros, Portree (1 April), The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool (2 April), Glen Urquhart Public Hall, Drumnadrochit (5 April), Universal Hall, Findhorn (6 April).

© Sue Wilson, 2008

Links

• Reinventing the Reel
• Lau
• Ainslie amd Henderson