root salad Phønix
Unmistakeable with their special instrumental/ vocal blend. Chris Nickson catches up with Denmark’s finest.
W
e spend our lives reinventing ourselves, slowly evolving. It’s the nature of things. And it’s true with bands, too. The urge
for change arrives. Sometimes it’s for the worse, but sometimes it can bring a breath of energy to the sound and performance. Denmark’s Phønix have been going – and growing – since 1990, but with their new album, Nu, they’ve taken a quantum leap, adding keyboards to the core of accordeon, percussion, clarinet / bass clarinet and voice, and bringing in harmonies and multi-tracked vocals. It’s taken a while for them to come up with this new record, but the difference is startling. The Danish folk heart of the band is as strong as ever, but everything is fuller and more adventurous.
Back in 2012 we started talking about our next album,” recalled clarinettist Anja Præst. ”We wanted to renew our sound; after playing together for so many years you can reach a point where every possibil- ity with the repertoire and the instrumen- tation has already been tried out.”
“We decided to have no deadlines in this process, to free ourselves from taking the easy way,” continues singer and key- board player Karen Mose. “If you have a deadline, and something is new to you, and you don’t really know how to make it work, you find yourself giving up on it very early and go back to something you know. We wanted to keep exploring new stuff and we promised each other that we would give every tune or song or sound or idea a positive chance even if we initially had the feeling, that this is too different from the ‘Phønix sound’.”
Having their own studio gave them the luxury to try things and let mistakes happen. That’s been important in taking these steps forwards, Mose insists, because “We could listen to our work in progress and find out what works and what doesn’t, while listening instead of while playing. It is two different ways of being in the music – listening and playing.”
Mose had used keyboards when putting together arrangements for the band, so trying it out as a regular part of the lineup was a natural thing to do.
“The other guys also had great ideas for the piano that made it possible for them to take on a new role with their instrument – suddenly the accordeon didn’t have to carry the melody, and the bass clarinet didn’t have to carry the bass line.”
For the first time, they didn’t road-test the new material before recording. As part of the new approach, everything was developed in the studio, including the idea of vocal harmonies.
“We’ve been talking about doing vocal harmonies and layering in our live concerts for a long time, so it was natural to incorporate this,” says Præst. “Now we’re excited to present it live as well.”
The challenge now is to perform the material live. Mose will be using a Nord- Electro keyboard live, and is excited about the possibilities it offers, because “now I can also be a part of the instrumental tunes! There will still be a lot of songs without keys though. For us a Phønix con- cert is all about meeting each other in the music and having a party with each other and the audience. And I need to be able to dance around on stage – behind the key- board and the microphone stand I can’t dance half as much as I need to.”
Although the new sound is palpably
fuller, with plenty of beauty, they haven’t abandoned the traditional ballads that have always been such a large part of their repertoire. They’ve long included original instrumentals on their albums and in their live sets, and put their own music to old words. Can it be long before their own songs make it to disc?
“We have tried out some of our own songs in the experimenting process,” Præst explains, “but we wanted to use the old songs and folk ballads too, and the new and old songs were too different from each other to be on the same album. Next album, maybe.”
“I
’m practising and practising and practising,” Mose adds with a laugh, “but there’s a lot to live up to, with these amazing old lyrics that have survived for several hundred years.”
The innovation doesn’t just extend to the music; Phønix are coming up with new ways of presenting it to audiences, too.
“First up is a release tour in Den- mark,” says Præst. “We’ve rented a bus that the audience can hop on and stay for however long they want while we play our music and serve some snacks and bever- ages.” That will be followed by tours of Germany, then the rest of Europe, before breaking even more new ground. “We’re also going to China in the end of 2014 as part of a Danish culture campaign togeth- er with the Danish culture minister and other dignitaries. It’s going to be interest- ing and exciting to see what they make of our music there.”
New roots and folk routes. Moving forwards in all directions. Twenty years in and there’s a new fire about Phønix that bodes well for the next couple of decades. There might not be ashes, but like the names, the band is rising again.
You heard Maria from Phønix’s latest
album Nu on last issue’s fRoots 49 compi- lation.
www.phonixfolk.dk F 23 f
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