ABOUT DIRK CAMPBELL

I was born in Egypt in 1950 and lived in Kenya, East Africa until the age of 11, when my parents decided to return home to England, which wasn’t home for me. England was a dismal clammy foreign place which I had no desire to live in and still don’t, really… but I benefited culturally from living in London far more than if I had stayed in Kenya. London has hundreds of different immigrant communities and is a pretty good place to find out about non-western music, if you’re interested, which I was.

As a British ex-colonial and therefore a perpetual outsider, I have learned to live with being and doing things which ordinary people find incomprehensible. I am usually asked two questions after a performance: “How (which really means “why”) did you learn to play these unusual instruments?” And, “Is that fujara thing a sort of didgeridoo?” Suppressing the desire to hit the second questioner, I explain sweetly and reasonably that no, a fujara is not a type of didgeridoo, and the reason I have learned to play these things is that I have a strong feeling for ancient tradition and the extraordinary richness and beauty of human culture across the world, most of which is now facing either involuntary modernization or total extinction. I have learned to play the music of many of these traditions.
Nobody has ever asked me: “How can one person claim to know so many musical styles in any depth?” If they did, I suppose the answer would be that I am by accident of birth what you might call a musical multi-linguist, fluent in a few musical languages and knowing enough to get by in others. I have been to many countries and studied their folk music at first hand. So I feel qualified, by experience if nothing else, to put together this CD-ROM collection of strange and beautiful wind instruments. I hope very much that you will find the sounds as pleasing as I do, and as useful for compositional purposes.

-Dirk Campbell

Credits

Performed and produced by Dirk Campbell
Additional performances by Juan Mateo (panpipes) and Clive Bell (shakuhachi)
Looping by Andy Reynolds
Graphic design by Dirk Campbell
Layout by element 18, LA
Thanks to Shelly and Mark Hiskey at ILIO for their support. Fulsome thanks to Dave Stewart for putting me on to ILIO in the first place.

From the day they opened their doors in 1994, ILIO has been committed to producing useful, timeless and inspiring sample libraries for musicians. Tapping years of experience in sound design and electronic composition, their knowledge of the quality demands of today's music scene is the driving force behind every title they release.