The Bagpipe Society

Review: New Leaf

The New Leaf - Nicholas Konradsen I’m not one to over-use superlatives as they quickly become meaningless. However, this is a really excellent album on a number of levels and puts Nicholas Konradsen on the map as a good one to watch. He’s a young musician and composer from Louth in Lincolnshire (NE England) and an instrument maker focusing on making single-reeded bagpipes and some niche stringed instruments. He first

got interested in folk music in 2018 when he picked up a piano accordion which led him, in his words “to the wonderful world of drone instruments”. Considering that he’s gone from ground zero to producing a high quality album of self-composed tunes for pipes and hurdy-gurdy in 5 years is astonishing.

At the risk of having my Chanter subscription cancelled and my chanter broken over the knee of the Editor in a ceremony at next year’s Blowout… there are only a few albums featuring solo bagpipes I can listen to more than once. I’ve played this one a lot since it arrived in the post and each time I find something new and interesting in all 19 tracks. He’s clearly interested in the traditional instrumental music found in NW Europe and Scandinavia and has added to that broad genre of drone-based dance music with intelligence and swagger.

The border pipes were made for him by Jon Swayne as a left-handed set. He made the Swedish pipes in ‘E/A’ himself. The hurdy-gurdy is an alto lute-back model from Jean-Claude Boudet and is the main driving force of the album as most of the tunes were composed on it. He plays all three equally well.

I asked Nicholas how the album came about “I wrote all the tunes myself, some are closer to existing traditional tunes than others. I usually either come up with part of, or a whole tune at once and either whip out my phone to record a scruffy version, or hum it into my phone after getting out of the shower or in the car or wherever I happen to be. The tune Humbermarch was 'written' by humming it into my phone's recorder while I was actually passing over the Humber bridge in the car!”. The repertoire here is a mix of bourrees, waltzes, jigs, polskas - even a Kopenitsa - and slow tunes which are destined to end up in the general repertoire as good tunes to play in a session or in a band. I’d buy it for that alone.

Recorded by Jon Loomes, who gave Nicholas support and encouragement, the overall sound, the quality of the compositions and the assured playing is uniformly excellent throughout. It’s hard to pick out a favourite. Each time I play it I have a new one, but when I played it again this morning I really loved ‘Kaleidoscope Schottische’ which uses a deceptively simple set of interlinking patterns summoning the atmosphere of ancient dance music and builds into a pipes/hurdy-gurdy duet that is mesmeric.

Buy this. Learn the tunes. As for Nicholas I hope he’s planning to form a band.

The CD is available directly from Nicholas at nicholasskonradsen@outlook.com or digital download from Bandcamp

https://nicholaskonradsen.bandcamp.com/album/the-new-leaf