Michael O’Neill - Ontophony

Songlines is primarily a jazz label, but world music influences have often been a part of the music they produce, and every once in a while a local, purely world music project comes along that they feel they just have to do. In fact Vancouver, with its great variety of immigrant and ethnic communities from Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, is a hotbed of world music activity, including many examples of cross-cultural music-making. Michael O'Neill is a classically trained composer and pianist who was drawn as a youth to the highland pipes and has been playing them ever since. This record is the culmination of Michael's interest in expanding the piping tradition into new realms of sound and expression – four works composed over the last 15 years for pipes and various percussion instruments.