Orchestra Macaroon - Breakfast In Balquhidder

(October 2004) 12 tracks: Arriving In Oban * Sun In The Eyes * The Old Dispensary * Tobar Halamog Variation * Auga * The Irish Sea * Breakfast In Balquhidder * Karmac * Hall Farm Blues * Guapa * Tobar Halamog * Low Tide.

Captivating, sublime and totally stylish, Orchestra Macaroon fuses the instruments and rhythms of several cultures into a coherent and pulsating whole.

Gaitas, Highland pipes and Border pipes play together * flugel horn and congas, gaitas, uillean pipes and yan qin mix and meld through blues, Scottish themes and folk tunes from far away.

"Warm winter night music" (Financial Times)

"Shot Through With Joyful Melody... massive intoxicating sound... a wake up call to the dead" (Norman Chalmers, Scotland On Sunday)

"Orchestra Macaroon have mixed congas, piano, sea samples and pipes. Somehow it works... a seriously bagpipe-driven 53 minutes" (The Guardian)

"From car-free but music-rich Easdale Island in Argyll, this collective (including Waterboy Steve Wickham) is formed round ex-Waterboy Colin Blakey, Phil Bull and bass player Steve Brown and is evolving a hybrid of Scottish, European, Latin and even Oriental sounds. The eclectic, all-instrumental album's twelve tracks are Blakey compositions, shot through with joyful melody, often on various mouth and bellows-blown bagpipes - and if the drums could do with a spanner here and there, Phil's beautiful string playing, with hammered dulcimer player Kim Ho Ip, opens the kitchen door to the massive intoxicating sound of the eponymous 'Breakfast' - a wake-up call to the dead." (Norman Chalmers, Scotland On Sunday)