55 f VARIOUS ARTISTS


Why The Mountains Are Black Third Man Records TMR334


R Crumb, who provides the cover illustration to this double CD package, likes to call this stuff “Goat Herder Music”, a label wryly bor- rowed from scornful fellow 78rpm crate diggers. This is niche, even within that world of dusty shellac.


Herein we find 28 sides of rural Greek tradi- tional music, recorded largely in 1930s Athens, and remastered as well as these things can be. This, in all likelihood, is all the information you require to decide whether you will give it a listen.


Polymath collector/producer Christopher King is deeply invested in the material he has arranged here, as his extensive liner essay/ manifesto makes clear, but he is not out to make converts. Indeed, the lead track on the collection, a dance tune performed on gaidas (bagpipes) and drum, feels like it was placed there to ward off casual listeners. It is glori- ous, riotous, unrestrained and beautiful. It also sounds like a free noise exercise per- formed on duelling stylophones.


Make it past this bracing start and the road gets a little less rough at times, but only a little. The material varies widely: full-throat- ed performative songs butting up against humble shepherd’s flute ripples, reflecting the range of social functions this music served in a world before recorded sound had left its mark. Even the most restrained and reflective moments in this collection, haunting fiddle taximia and hypnotic clarinet laments, are alien, hard to pin down. And then along comes another berserk bagpipe number, in case your attention had wandered.


The whole listening experience fizzles with the refreshingly punk rock sense of a compilation daring you to enjoy it.


www.thirdmanrecords.com Liam Kirby


9BACH Anian RealWorld CDRW214


Masters of light and shade, 9Bach’s follow up to their BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winning Tin- cian is bellyful of bittersweet juxtapositions. Anian wears its heart on its sleeve: a brood- ing, tormented series of songs with uneasy and dystopian themes. Yet there is a balance, offering up a hopeful patch of blue in an overcast, slate-grey sky. It suggests a sense of connection, community and revolution – change within our grasp. The (mostly) live recording captures the symbiosis in the 9Bach musical family, intensifying the ever-raw emotive delivery.


Anian means ‘nature, the natural order, natural morality, the natural world, creation. What you are made of, your soul and bones, and how you connect with other people’. Here, singer Lisa Jên’s songwriting explores troubling contemporary themes: she rages and lashes out at injustice and cruelty. On Yr Olaf, rumbling, rolling bass and drum, dub- delayed dulcimer and guitar underpin a three-part vocal harmony about a poacher and the last white rhino in Sudan. Ifan is inspired by the heart-rending tale of a Russian boy raised by, and then separated from, wild dogs; the desolate piano and vocal melody leaving no doubt about the tale’s poignancy.


But despite the disgorged pain, the defining feature of Anian is its artful beauty. The yin is the gossamer-layered harmony vocals of Lisa Jên, Mirain and Esyllt; the cas- cading other-worldly, kora-like harp; the 9Bachian piano motifs (check out the


9Bach


archetype in the apocalyptic apology, Deryn); the beguiling and lucid melodic lines. The yang is Martin’s trademark dirty guitar riffs and effects; Dan’s pulsing dub bass lines and Ali’s intuitive drumming.


Some songs are rooted in North Wales –


Llyn Du a homage to dark mysterious, watery depths with its tumbling waterfall voice and harp – but horizons stretch in every direction. Cyfaddefa has a meandering Eastern Mediterranean-infused vocal hook, bluesy bouzouki-esque guitar, clattering hammered dulcimer, driving clap sticks and crashing drum refrains. Si Hwi Hwi, an anti-slavery song learned from the late lamented Merêd- dydd Evans, is sung with an instinctive inhale and exhale, redolent of the Australian out- back. “Celebrate the richness and variety of culture,” as Evans puts it. (The second CD fin- ishes with a fantastic Goldfrappian club remix tribute to Merêd in Crêd, featuring samples of the great man’s speech about language and identity, with a maybe more than a wink tipped to Josh!)


Owning trad arr with style, there is also a


melancholic Ambell Hiraeth and even a deconstructed cerdd dant in their setting of Gerallt Lloyd Owen’s poem, Heno, “a lament for the dying of the Welsh nation”. But even more ambitious, is second CD companion piece Yn Dy Lais (In Your Voice) in which writ- ers, actors, poets and singers – including Peter Gabriel, Maxine Peake and Rhys Ifans – offer up original spoken-word pieces to convey the essence of the songs to non-Welsh-speaking listeners. The diverse and captivating word of mouth interpretations paint vivid pictures.


Now that’s tradition in the making! www.realworld.com


Sarah Coxson


RANT Reverie Make Believe Records MBR6CD


That’s the thing about fid- dles: they go together so well, to make completely sat- isfying music, in unison, har- mony or parts, without even adding the lower tones of big relatives viola, cello or bass. RANT is four of them, in the sensitive hands of


Bethany Reid, Jenna Reid, Sarah-Jane Sum- mers and Lauren MacColl, played with the lift and spirit of Scottish and Shetland fiddling and rich elegance of tone, in thirteen tracks of memorable, shapely material in arrange- ments that fully utilise the possibilities of four-layered lines to make a fiddles-only string quartet.


So alive is Scottish fiddling these days


that it’s possible, indeed normal, to combine material from across the last two centuries with a great deal of fresh original composi- tion in a unified whole, well past any show of hot chops.


That’s exactly and impeccably what we


get on RANT’s second album, embracing and building on traditional forms, free-ranging in rhythms from dance to air, and all assuredly and pre-eminently melodious. Further increasing the variety is an atmospheric arrangement of an Icelandic hymn, and guest singers Julie Fowlis with a Gaelic vocal strath- spey and Ewan McLennan in Mary’s Dream, with the strings making splendid, enveloping accompaniment.


www.rantfiddles.com Andrew Cronshaw


ROBBIE FULKS Upland Stories Bloodshot BS242


Twenty-some years ago, when people first started bandying around the term alt-country, Robbie Fulks was a young singer-songwriter who seemed to be at the vanguard of the movement. He was country without being country, very Ameri-


can, but blending tenderness and brutal hon- esty with heavy doses of humour. After a few years he seemed to fall off the radar – or per- haps he just found the level that suited him.


Fast forward to 2014 and the Mini Mekons UK tour, which saw Fulks press- ganged into the band, also playing a solo set and recording the album Jura with them. Now it’s 2016, and Upland Stories appears, an album that shows how Fulks has grown as a writer, but still managed to keep that edge and wit that helped set him apart (as of the bluegrass of Katy Kay, where he rhymes “cuter” with “shoot’er” with a very sly wink).


Part of Fulks’s problem is that he never


sat comfortably in any one box, and he doesn’t here, not least in his choice of accompanists, who range from bluegrass and country veterans to musicians from tra- ditional and avant-garde jazz. They colour the music, but it’s always Fulks who’s front and centre in the songs, thanks to the pro- duction by Steve Albini (everyone from Cordelia’s Dad to Nirvana). He’s not so much a storyteller as an image taker. Never Come Home and Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals are snapshots slowly fading to sepia, thoughts of time and place, while Needed proves to be an ocean of tenderness.


Photo: © Judith Burrows


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