Grace Lemon and Paddi Benson – two highly-accomplished Uilleann pipers – and James Patrick Gavin, an acclaimed fiddle player and guitarist, have joined forces to explore the interlocking sounds of two pipes and write new music underpinned by narrative threads. Their debut project, ‘volume one – a curious dance’, was recorded in summer 2022 and is now set for release in September 2023. An original composition, this project reflects a shared interest in experimental and electronic music, as well as the tradition of storytelling – and folklore – within Irish music, as where they met.

The trio’s debut project is a conceptual retelling of the patient ballroom dances that took place at Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) throughout the 19th century. It is a blurred lines composition, in which the two sets of pipes speak to and layer upon one another almost like the right and left hand of a piano, rather than two distinct instruments. The intention is that the listener is caught between ‘who is playing what’, inspired by a line in Charles Dickens’ journal, The Uncommercial Traveller, where, walking passed the Bethlem Hospital in Southwark he commented, “Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?’ – a remark that sums up the wrongs of delineating the ‘affected’ from the ‘unaffected’.

A fascinating aspect of the Uilleann pipes is that the pitch and tone of each note on each chanter will differ; it is both a curious and incorrigible instrument to compose on. The result of the trio’s interest in the instrument itself – from idiosyncratic harmonics to the material resonance of wood and reeds – is a rich and unique sound that draws from both traditional and contemporary influences, moving between experimental minimalism and excerpts of self-penned reels and jigs.