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MARTYN BENNETT, who had died aged 34, was a musician responsible for mixing traditional Scottish folk with techno; his albums Bothy Culture and Hardland demonstrated the possibilities of combining his own virtuoso performances on the pipes and fiddle with the thumping beats of club rhythms.
Debilitated by cancer in recent years, he was unable to play on his recently completed album Grit, but it showed a continuing interest in the combination of diverse styles, mixing hardbeats with samples drawn from the songs and stories of Romanies and Gaelic singers which Bennett had recorded. He also, in Glen Lyon, released a gentler collection of music featuring his mother Margaret's singing, in a song cycle exploring his family history.
Martyn Bennett was born on February 17 1971 at St John's, Newfoundland, to a family from Scotland and Wales, and grew up amidst Gaelic-speaking farmers in the Cordroy Valley in the west of the province before his parents moved to Quebec.
When Martyn was six, his parents separated and he moved back to Scotland, settling on Mull and then, when he was 10, at Kingussie on Speyside. There, under the tutelage of David Taylor, he took up the chanter, and by...