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root salad Marit & Rona


Norway meets the Highlands in this very imaginative new duo. Tim Chipping is thrilled.


“I


would like people to think of this album not just as music but as trying to document emotion.” How’s that for the start of an interview? No messing around. It’s that sort of joined-up thinking that’s produced one of the most exciting and surprising debut albums in many a long while. Exciting because Turas is as gutsy as it is elegant, at turns raw and refined. And it’s surprising because it seemed to come from nowhere.


But Marit Fält and Rona Wilkie didn’t come from nowhere. They came from Nor- way (via Sweden) and the Highlands of Scotland. Music has come from there before. But never, as far as we know, in this configuration – a thrilling and bound- less union.


Some introductions. Rona first: “My


mother’s a music teacher and I remember, when I was young, counting twelve violins under the bed. My brother, at the age of three, cut bow hairs because he was con- vinced they’d grow back.”


“I was taught both traditionally and classically simultaneously. And for a long time I wanted to become a classical violin- ist. But it became quite clear when I was about sixteen or seventeen that my heart lay elsewhere.”


And this is Marit: “I grew up in an area


that doesn’t have any traditional music at all. I grew up in Norway but my parents are Swedish and they met during what we call the ‘green wave’, which is basically the hippies, and traditional music was becom- ing more popular. So they folk danced and listened to fiddle music.”


“I took up the fiddle when I was eight. I was the only one in my city who played folk music. Then I would do these summer schools with this amazing fiddle player called Pers Hans.”


After abandoning the violin in disgust at having to practice scales, Marit went in search of an accompanying instrument. She settled on the bass drone mandola and “never looked back”.


“But I think it’s very good to have a fiddle background because so much of what we play is fiddle music. So to have an understanding of the bowing has been a real benefit.”


“The string quartet parts on the album are half me and half Marit,” says Rona. “We both had knowledge of differ- ent areas of music that we could bring in to the strings.”


They’re talking about the Cantilena Quartet who give Turas its sweeping beau- ty, while Allan Òg MacDonald seems almost to sneak in with eerie echoes of


percussion. It’s very difficult to describe something that sounds like nothing else.


Rona describes Turas as “a considered album.” For example, here’s what they considered for the song Seo a’ Bhliadhna:


“We thought a lot about how we arrange the instruments so that we could create an aura of what the singer was thinking. She was in this very difficult place so we created this sound like a clock ticking. The song is metaphorless so we created a very un-frilled arrangement. Similarly with the first track Fhuair Mi Pòg [heard on this issue’s fRoots 48 compila- tion]. The song is from the Battle of Worcester in the Civil War. And we created a track that’s dramatic, as a battlefield would’ve been.”


This musical mood setting is partly designed to circumvent the language bar- rier. The songs on Turas are sung in Scot- tish Gaelic (and on one occasion with counterpointing Swedish).


“I’d want people to forget that they


don’t understand the words,” says Marit. “Because this album is sung in a language most people don’t understand, it feels important to demonstrate musically what the lyrics are about.”


In 2012, Marit and Rona won the


Danny Kyle Award at Glasgow’s Celtic Con- nections and Rona was named Young Trad Musician of the Year. What gives someone the confidence to enter competitions? Did people tell you how good you were?


“For me it’s never been like that,” Marit shrugs, “because I was the only one


who played folk music where I lived. And with the låtmandola, no-one else really plays it so…”


Maybe you’re actually terrible at it and no-one can tell?


“F


“Well, who knows? No, I don’t think I’m terrible. I just try and be myself and I’m the best at being me.”


or four years I went to study history and considered being an academic,” admits Rona. “So going to Newcastle from


Edinburgh University was the best of both worlds because I could do music as half my masters and academia as the other half. It wasn’t till the end of that year I thought, ‘this is what I really love doing’. And that was why we entered the competitions. Because Marit was relatively new into the country and I’d spent the last four years being an academic, so if we wanted to make a living we really needed to be seen.”


“We decided to go in and do what we wanted to do rather than what we thought other people wanted to hear. And I’d say that was the best decision we ever made.”


For a non-musician, listening to Turas is a startling but joyous discovery. For musicians it should be an intimidating challenge. This is what’s asked of you. Make music that no one else is making. Make music that is completely your own. Make music that’s inspired, intelligent and brilliant. Go do that. Now.


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