79 f


of wonderful. It is brave, cavalier and every bit as good as another Welsh album I hold dear, Land Of My Mothers. And believe me, I love that album. This one though I would happily take to a desert island and play no matter if a ship rescued me or not.


Not only is it wonderful, it is inspired. How you cavort from blissed-out age-old Welsh dance tunes to a CD that defines a spir- it and nation I cannot begin to guess. Howev- er, I’ll give it a go.


Taran, it appears, is a way of doing things rather than a fixed line-up, the core players from their debut are retained but hand-picked guests such as the brilliant Kate Ronconi Woolard or Cass Meurig litter these sessions pushing the envelope that bit fur- ther, delivering a hint of Welshness to the party. For that is what we have here, a collec- tive which pushes identity headlong against contemporary sources and welds the two in place with rivets and girders.


The tracks bounce and rebound between political house grooves Bevan and Dominion, which sample the great voices and aspirations of Dylan Thomas and yer man against washes and wrap-around sam- ples, then make you mosh like crazy with paranoid antique woodwinds and heavy dub Veresk or the dance floor mixes of Dyf- fryn where a saxophone takes on vibes, pib- gorn and the refrain from Visage Fade To Grey. Inspired lunacy is everywhere, making thinking backwards logical, As The Sun stews telephone conversations with a long- ing vocal, tabla percussion and a smoky brass, the title track has Welsh rap and a driving, almost Breton, high melody with fiddles playing a slow march, breaking into house grooves and pipes. The whole grows and fills your brain. If you want cerebral music with roots here it is.


I could waffle on for pages about Hotel


Rex but fRoots doesn’t have the space. Just in case you haven’t got the idea yet, we are talk- ing milestone here. Yes Hotel Rex is that important. A monster recording, no question. Diolch yn fawr Taran.


www.myspace.com/ourspacetaran Simon Jones TRIO MIO


Love & Cigars Go’ Danish Folk Music GO0111


Considering Denmark’s Trio Mio began as a vehicle to play the compositions of violinist Kristine Heebøll, they’ve certainly grown over the course of several albums. Now they’re the equal of any Nordic band, bringing greater depth and complexity to the music, with all three members contributing tunes and adding more instruments to give even more richness to the sound. It wouldn’t work if they weren’t all superb musicians, wonderful- ly in sync with each other.


Their grounding is still in folk music (and


there’s one traditional piece, Stormen, which is all gussied-up in a superb arrangement), but the rest all comes from the band. It’s a delight to hear Jens Ulvsand using guitar as well as bouzouki, and it’s apparent on this disc that the atmosphere of a piece – what’s between the notes as much as what’s played – is vital. They can put a little Western twang into the title cut or make Mette Maries Menuet quite Mozartian, and do it all with great delicacy and style.


At this point their albums have gradu- ated to vital listening, not just for those interested in Danish or Nordic music, but for anyone who loves excellent adventurous music, period.


www.triomio.dk Chris Nickson


ETHNO TRIO TROITSA Zimachka Vigma 3666-1


Not many releases come this way from Belarus, the land-locked and still politically unrelaxed country surrounded by the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, but sever- al of those have been earlier releases from Minsk trio Troitsa, and they chart the progress to this sixth album.


Ivan Kirchuk is the possessor of one of those real, rumbling bass voices that seem to flourish in Russia and its near neighbours, and conjures mental images of a huge beard- ed Cossack in boots and floor-length furs.


He formed the original trio in 1996 to perform the traditional material he’d been finding since the 1980s in the villages of Belarus. After its first album the group broke up, but after a pause Kirchuk recruited Yuri Dmitriev and Yuri Pavlovsky, who supplement his armoury of 12-string guitar, domra, gusli, jew’s-harp, whistles, zhaleika and more with guitar, bass, domra, kalimba and percussion.


His singing tends to stay down in the gravelly basement, accessing tones that an epic film-trailer voice-over artist would kill for, but on occasion he rises through the fre- quencies, right up to a rather finely-con- trolled falsetto-alto.


Zimachka (Winter), recorded in Poland, is a remarkable and rather impressive thing of wild rhythmic pulses and gutsy instru- mental textures, massive enough to match the Eisenstein-sized drama of Kirchuk’s declamatory, welkin-ringing rendering of traditional songs brought a long way from the village but nevertheless still sounding like nothing in western Europe.


All the text on the package is in Cyrillic, but their web site www.troitsa.net has infor- mation in English.


Andrew Cronshaw


HABADEKUK Hopsadaddy Go’ Danish Folk Music GO1710


IMPULS TRIO


Bugge, Bæk & Vinther Go’ Danish Folk GO7011


It’s a bit of a Kristian Bugge fest. Not only is he on both these albums, he can also be found on the recently-released Jensen & Bugge album, making him – for now at least – the hardest-working man in Danish folk. Habadekuk is certainly the more adventurous of the two discs here, featuring not only


Trio Mio


Bugge’s fiddle, but also accordeon, guitar, bass, piano, drums and three brass players. The nearest analogy might well be Bellow- head, although this is all instrumental. It cer- tainly offers another, kicking take on the Danish tradition, whether stomping on Prop- træken or offering something slow and melodic like Spilledåsen. It’s more straightfor- ward than Bellowhead, but still wonderfully exciting, with superb arrangements that often build to a roar and make full use of having the brass section in this nine-man out- fit. They do look to the repertoire of Æ Tinus- er, one of the seminal Danish bands that fea- tured trombone. But this is definitely music for dancing – hard to keep still, in fact.


www.habadekuk.dk The Impuls Trio disc is much more low-


key, mixing fiddle with guitar (and man- dolin) as well as accordeon from Phønix’s Jes- per Vinther. The focus here is on rare old tunes, and the sources are carefully noted. These pieces are well worth discovering, and the playing is delicate and exquisite. Not every tune here is ancient – some date from the middle of the 20th Century or later in the case of Læsø Rejlænder. There are a few guests (sparing use of trombone, drums and double bass) and the arrangements are exquisite, making full use of the different tones of the instruments and setting them against each other, melodically and rhythmi- cally. The trio are very evenly matched, and there’s huge joy in the music-making here, with a real sense of playfulness. It’s a very different kind of treasure to the big band, but that doesn’t mean its treasures aren’t every bit as rich.


www.impulstrio.dk Chris Nickson DANIEL NORGREN


Horrifying Deatheating Bloodspider Super Puma SPR006


Now there’s a title you didn’t expect, but if it grabbed your attention, all the better. Described as an “experimental blues man”, multi-instrumentalist Norgren has come out of Sweden with a quite astonishing album that goes well beyond such a narrow descrip- tion. Yes, on Lovedog and Mean Old Devil Got On II, he sounds like a mutated take on Howling Wolf, Captain Beefheart, Entrance’s Guy Blakerslee and Jack White (with the odd moment of Stax soul or backwards tapes thrown in, just to confuse), but that’s just the start of it – the opener, Big Black Bull, is all thudding drums and just-this-side-of-ludicrous- but-compelling falsetto, creating an atmo-


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