Virtual Hebrides

Original Release Date: 2001. "All in all, Faerie Stories is an utterly excellent album." "The most pumping, uplifting and exciting Scottish fusion you're ever likely to come across. Pipes, whistles, fiddles and percussion - even throat singing!"

The first recording from the Faeries displaying their blend of crisply played tunes on pipes, fiddle and whistle combined with a world class rhythm section. All your traditional instruments here with a sort of Jazz twist!

Other Reviews:

Nothing in the recognisable front line of bagpipes, fiddle, synthesiser, bass & rhythm guitar with a straight drum kit at the back, prepares you for the high octane music the Peatbog Faeries create. Powerful melodies are dextrously pumped out with a smart degree of techno attitude, while cross-rhythms ricochet over a heavy bass that hits you forcefully like a massive heart beat. Reggae, dub & soca rhythms all play their part with a lot of gorgeously undulating modal melodies from Macedonia and further, so the packed audience who crowd around the stage can almost salsa as well as perform the high-jumping ceilidh moves such music encourages. With no time wasted with chat other than the odd tune title, the band induce an uninhibited joy. One sylph-like woman, hair reaching well below her bottom, sinuously undulated all night, removing items of clothing as the place & pace gets hotter until she is in quasi-belly dance garb. Sexy is not a word normally associated with Celtic music but this certainly is. (Jan Fairley - The Scotsman 25/8/99)

"...The Peatbog Faeries' increasingly adventurous melting pot of fragmented fiddle & pipe tunes...deep dub basslines and all-round spacy electronica comprehensively rocked the house" The Scotsman 1 July 1999 (Concert for Kosovo - Edinburgh Playhouse)

"These boys can play a mean tune, twisting ambient synth round insistent bass & the pipes. Imagine The Orb meeting a Ceilidh band in the mind of Irvine Welsh. This is it. Billy Nasty might have mixed pipes & dance on the decks but the Peatbog Faeries can play it live and it blew the audience away." Edinburgh Evening News 1 July 1999 (Concert for Kosovo - Edinburgh Playhouse)

"The Peatbog Faeries...rock"! Norma Waterson Sunday Times June 1999

"Loud and proud, at once timelessly earthy and boldly futuristic, this is a band unafraid to aim for the majestic, yet gaining all the time in finesse." The Scotsman 15 June 1998