Fàilte - Welcome to Derek's website. Here is the central station which will direct you to the main sites across the web where you can go in order to listen to the music.
From Applecross in the West Highlands of Scotland, Derek MacLennan brings you a view from the croft. Afro-Beat influenced funk grooves and good measures of bluesy electric guitar fused with some traditionally inspired phrasings provide the backdrop to his quite individual vocal style. A Highland perspective, presented with something of a bardic style of delivery, sets the scene. For many many years now Celtic melodies have been getting blended with African rhythms in a balanced and soulful way and there is no doubt here that there are more ways yet for styles and traditions to come together with meaning. The 'Cuisle', sometimes known as the 'endless groove', is an infinately adaptable dance generator with a pulsing chordal link between the rhythm and the melody, the crucial groove that is as at home with Puirt a Beul or an Oran Luaidh as it is with Funk, R&B or Afrobeat.
The singing is occasionally in Gaelic - the language which united Scotland, or Alba, in the indigenous tongue itself. Only rarely given credit for its true worth - yet flexible, versatile and poetic - it's as good a language to sing in as any. At any rate, it will remain a feature as long as Dereks Gaelic improves and he continues to tire with the limitations of trying to get by in English all the time.
Free downloads and listens
Let's get straight on to the music itself now, and there are a number of different ways here for you to listen to it, but for starters why not check out this video...?
10 Out Of Illusion was first released on CD in June 2005.
If you like the music and decide to download a song please do us a favour and leave some feedback.
10 Out of Illusion is getting a few plays over at last FM. You can listen to all the tracks on the album there right now.
And the profile over at myspace has been up and running for a while now. A remix of Chunna mi Aisling can be heard here.
Recently posted - Shuas mun Chnoc-fhaire - a reworking of Bob Dylans classic All Along the Watchtower translated to the Gaelic by Isle of Skye bard Rody Gorman.
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