False Harmonics #23: Brìghde Chaimbeul, Cleek Schrey & Nora Brown, Laura Ortman

False Harmonics #23: Brìghde Chaimbeul, Cleek Schrey & Nora Brown, Laura Ortman

For the 23rd iteration, False Harmonics welcomes Scottish piper Brìghde Chaimbeul to the Pioneer Works North Hall, along with special performances by NYC-based duo of Cleek Schrey (fiddle) & Nora Brown (banjo), as well as a solo performance by violinist Laura Ortman. Please note that Kelly Moran is no longer performing.

About the artists...

Brìghde Chaimbeul

Brìghde Chaimbeul is a leading purveyor of celtic experimentalism and a master of the

Scottish smallpipes—the mellower and more emotive cousin to the famous Highland bagpipes—and she’s taken them to the global stage. A native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Skye, Brìghde roots her music in her language and culture. She rose to prominence as a prodigy of traditional music, but has since begun a journey to take the smallpipes into uncharted territory. She has devised a completely unique way of arranging for pipe music that emphasises the rich textural drones of the instrument; the constancy of sound that creates a trance-like atmosphere, played with enticing virtuosic liquidity. She draws inspiration from the world of interconnected piping traditions, and her most recent album takes influence from ambient, avant garde and electronic music. One can talk about Brìghde’s awards (BBC Young Folk Award; BBC Horizons Award; SAY Award nominee) and her wide array of collaborators (Caroline Polachek; Colin Stetson; Gruff Rhys; Aidan O'Rourke...) but after it all, her music speaks for itself.

Haunting, entrancing, breathtaking, beautiful – this open-eared, understatedly virtuosic performer is transforming and creating new definitions for Scottish folk in the 21st century.

Cleek Schrey & Nora Brown (duo)

Described by the Irish Times as “a musician at one with his instrument and his music,” Cleek Schrey is a fiddler and improviser from Bath County, Virginia. Active in experimental and traditional music communities, he has collaborated with a diverse array of artists including the electronic music pioneer David Behrman, Fluxus composer Yasunao Tone, and viola da gamba virtuoso Liam Byrne. Particularly interested in the alternate tunings of repertoire from the American South, Cleek has brought his mixture of old fiddle music and austere experimentalism to places like Big Ears (TN), the Kilkenny Arts Festival (IE), Issue Project Room (NYC), and London’s Cafe Oto. The journal Sound Post has noted that Schrey “possesses a rare combination of traits: deep respect for traditional music and the people who make it, and an unbounded curiosity about new directions for sound."

Nora Brown was introduced to traditional music by chance as a six year old. What her parents assumed would be routine ukulele lessons were an inconspicuous window to the world of old-time music. From his tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn, the late Shlomo Pestcoe, a historian and old-time musician taught Nora old time tunes on the ukulele and through his continued instruction other traditional instruments– the fiddle, mandolin, guitar and banjo. 

Nora now plays traditional Appalachian music with a focus on banjo playing from Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Along with mentors in the northeast like the late John Cohen she also has traveled and learned directly from master musicians including Alice Gerrard, George Gibson and the late Lee Sexton.

Laura Ortman

A soloist musician, artist, composer, and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, filmic and artistic soundtracks. Ortman has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Okkyung Lee, Caroline Monnet, Jeffery Gibson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, New Red Order, Susan Alcorn, Loren Connors, among others. An inquisitive and exquisite amplified violinist, she is also versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and often sings through a megaphone and is a producer of capacious field recordings.

She has performed at the Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim, and MOMA, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Dia Foundation, and CBGB's in New York, La Biennale di Venezia 2024 in Italy, Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as countless established and DIY venues and festivals across North America and Europe. In 2008, she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Indigenous orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Indigenous cast. The Coast Orchestra premiered at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Ortman has lived in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn since 1997.