A prompt half-seven start and within five minutes the audience has forgotten the Glasgow evening rain outside and in a rather sweaty St Lukes has been energised by the strident opening songs by Malin Lewis. Playing alongside Sally Simpson (fiddle) and Ali Hutton (guitar), Lewis’ pieces are immediately invigorating and uplifting, fusing their dazzling technique with a reflective, philosophical outlook rooted in their upbringing in Ardnamurchan on Scotland’s west coast.
Turning their experience as a trans person into a theme for the current Halocline album, Lewis is inspired by transition and life at nature’s boundaries (the album’s name references the visible line of water in-between fresh and saline, and its cover pictures Lewis against a blue sea) and there’s relaxed, good-natured chat between artist and audience as they take us on a very Scottish Folk journey, evoking the restless stormy energy of its natural environment and the atmospheric calm of its lapping shores.
Lewis plays one of their own home-invented and made bagpipes, swapping often for fiddle, played with equal mastery: at times the rhythms and textures recall Irish 80s Folk giants Moving Hearts (Lewis could be described as a Davey Spillane for our times), shifting between time signatures before exploding into rapid fluttering demi-semiquavers in unison with Simpson’s fiddle, on top of Hutton’s sure-footed strumming. He uses octivided bass to add a powerful underpinning basis to many of the pieces, and taps of his left foot trigger a kick-drum that adds an insistent propulsion, driving the (mainly youthful) audience to vigorous dancing, enjoying that involving warmth that comes with a very Scottish communal musical experience.
I had wondered how Baiuca would be able, post-interval, to revive the warmth and energy that Lewis had previously established, given the emphasis on programmed electronic dance rhythms and sampled or synthesised textures, which, no matter how loudly they boom through the speakers, can’t replace the excitement of live playing. But Baiuca’s approach is very different to say Floating Points, Disclosure or other contemporary dance electricians: his sound-world blends contemporary dance electronics with Galician Folk singing and rhythms, overlayering traditional instruments such as flauta (recorder), pandeireta (tambourine) and tamboril (snare), adding a human-generated excitement to the electronic beats; these are supplied by a powerful percussionist, beating-out insistent semiquavers on hub-caps and petrol can, which put me in mind somewhat of the late Israeli singer Ofra Harza, who enjoyed success in the late 1980s with a blend of traditional singing and percussion-heavy dancefloor.
But chief among the traditional colourings is the extraordinary upper-register traditional chanting, some of which is pre-sampled, but much is supplied by Baiuca’s two cantareiras-pandereteiras (traditional Galician female singers/percussionists), who provide the majority of the top-line melody, and whose shrill energy lifts the groove up into roof-raising territory, multiplied when a feature instrument such as a giant shaker-pole takes the front of stage, providing cross-rhythmic complexity and excitement. A fantastic additional female vocalist added on occasion a more contemporary melodic lyricism to the mix and provided a front-person focus.
With the set intensifying in energy and force, I had forgotten any misgivings I might have harboured about whether electro-beats and traditional music can fit together: in Celtic Connections-land, and in Baiuca’s hands, they most certainly do.
