Arts blog: Claire Black on a serendipitous soundtrack to a trip up north

Published on 04/10/2012 00:00

I DON’T know what your desk looks like, but mine’s a bit of a mess. There are books piled each and every way, tattered compliments slips covered in scribbled numbers I can no longer read and at least two empty staplers.

In one corner, there’s a small pile of CDs. A while back the top three on this squinty stack arrived in a squishy envelope from a small Scottish record label. Farrar, Canaich and Affric, they formed a trilogy, composed and recorded by Scots fiddle player Duncan Chisholm. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with them – I don’t review albums – so that was that. They just sat there. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was clearing my desk getting ready for a holiday up north. The idea was to unplug and unwind. We’d be walking first in the Cairngorms and then in Orkney. We’d be reading the books we’d not got round to, but there’d be no telly, no laptops, no Twitter. There’d be no iPod stuffed with 15,000 tracks, we weren’t taking any music. At the last minute, though, I panicked, figuring that no music for a week in which we’d be driving hundreds of miles with dodgy radio reception might be a bit daft. So the Strathglass Trilogy was slung into my bag. I’d only listened to a couple of tracks from one album but I figured that driving almost the entire length of Scotland would either be the perfect time to bond with some contemporary Scottish folk, or we’d turn it off and have a sing-a-long.

Happily, that didn’t happen. We listened to each album at least a dozen times, maybe more. Chisholm is a magnificent fiddle player with a warm, rich tone that’s full of feeling. We got to know every track. We sang along. We sang them in the kitchen as we cooked or in the bath as we soaked our aching muscles. They were the soundtrack of our holiday.

When I got back a couple of days ago, I looked at Chisholm’s website. It has taken him six years to make his trilogy. He wanted to inspire a sense of the landscape around Beauly, where his family comes from, and although we weren’t in that part of Scotland, his music, at times haunting, at others sweet or celebratory, added a dimension to our travels that somehow made the landscape more vivid, more awesome. It also turns out that the launch for the third album, Affric, is in Edinburgh tomorrow. I’m not really one for ascribing things to fate or serendipity, but in this instance, just this once, I might.

• Duncan Chisholm plays the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow night, and tours Scotland throughout October. www.duncanchisholm.co.uk