International Disgrace

The marvellously mutant musical organism known as Babelfish was first spawned well over a decade ago, at Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival. Amidst the primordial soup of the infamous Festival Club, Scottish musicians would often find themselves press-ganged onstage at short notice, often in decidedly random combinations, whenever a scheduled act failed to show up.
Thus it was that Babelfish's founding foursome - pianist Andy Thorburn, fiddler Adam Sutherland, accordionist John Somerville and drummer Iain Copeland, collectively of Blazin' Fiddles, Peatbog Faeries, Treacherous Orchestra, Session A9, Box Club and Croft No. Five fame - discovered the singular catalytic chemistry between their rapacious musical appetites.

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Piano

On his latest album simply entitled Piano, Andy looks beyond his usual accompanying role, stepping into the spotlight with an outstanding solo set of his own compositions. The material on Piano has been drawn from a variety of sources. Several pieces were originally composed for theatre or dance productions; others penned in tribute to a person or favourite landscape, between them ranging widely in style from lively dance tunes to lyrical slow airs.

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Tuath gu Deas

Andy's composition Tuath gu Deas (North to South) is a work for 12 unaccompanied voices in Gaelic and Scots with lyrics by Aonghas MacNeacail. The piece was premiered at Celtic Connections in January as part of their New Voices commission series and will feature on STV's Gaelic music series Tacsi. Tuath gu Deas is a musical expression of 2000 years, a colourful and rhythmic story with simple and intimate melodies balanced against larger scale choral patterns. It is a collage/chronicle of communities and migration to and from Scotland, as the country approaches a new cultural age. The work had its first performance on Sunday 17th January in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, sung by twelve of Scotland's very best and weel-kent singers: Rod Paterson, Jim Malcolm, Rory Campbell, Charlie MacLeod, Corrina Hewat, Elspeth Cowie, Mary MacMaster, Mary Ann Kennedy, Alyth McCormack, Lindsay Black, Christine Kydd and Heather MacLeod.

"... the piece succeeded superbly through Thorburn's boldly inventive, kaleidoscopic use of harmony, with shifting arrangements of sub-groups and soloists, sung and spoken passages, which built up to an aptly celebratory, authentically uplifting finish." (The Scotsman)

"... an undoubted triumph ... The piece was the star ..." (The Herald)

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