Colin Stetson and Brighde Chaimbeul

Colin Stetson and Brìghde Chaimbeul are a duo pairing a Montreal-based saxophonist with a Scottish smallpipes player, formed after years of parallel careers spent expanding what their respective instruments were assumed capable of. Their debut full-length collaboration, All the light in the world, was released September 11, 2026^[6].

Stetson was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 3, 1975, and earned a music degree from the University of Michigan in 1997 before relocating to Montreal. He built a career as a session and touring saxophonist for Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Bell Orchestre, Tom Waits, and Anthony Braxton, alongside a solo catalog including the New History Warfare trilogy, Sorrow: A Reimagining of Henryk Górecki's 3rd Symphony, and All This I Do for Glory. He is also a prolific film composer, scoring Hereditary, Color Out of Space, and The Menu. His playing is defined by extended techniques including circular breathing, multiphonics, altissimo register, microtones, reed vocalizations, and percussive valve work^[1].

Chaimbeul was born in 1999 and raised in Sleat on the Isle of Skye, a native Gaelic speaker in a musical family. She learned piano and fiddle before taking up the pipes at age seven, and discovered the Scottish smallpipes, the bellows-blown, mellower cousin of the Highland bagpipe, in 2014. She won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award in 2016 and the Horizon Award at the 2019 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, the same year her debut album The Reeling was named a Guardian Folk Album of the Month. Her second solo album, Carry Them With Us, followed in 2023, and she shared the 2023 Piper of the Year title with Ally Crowley-Duncan^[2].

Stetson first took notice of Chaimbeul through The Reeling^[3], and the two first recorded together on "Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom (I Am Disposed of Mirth)," a track featuring Stetson on Chaimbeul's Carry Them With Us^[4]. That session convinced them to make a full duo record. All the light in the world was written and performed entirely by the pair with no additional musicians or overdubs, recorded live at Stetson's Vermont studio, The End of the World, engineered by Jonas Verwijnen and mixed by Stetson^[7]. Stetson has described the album's process as improvisation held inside deliberately strict structural parameters rather than open soloing^[3].