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articulation is forceful yet subtle and effec- tive. A good example is the opening track The Poet’s Mission with its seamless blend of music and lyrics. Plucked Spanish guitar adds extra drama to Burn The Sun with Duke Spe- cial’s resigned delivery of the lyric which, devoid of effect and combined with supple blasts of slip jigs, makes for an ethereal yet haunting affair. Shipyards Of Belfast, a poem by local playwright Thomas Carnduff, depicts an industry committed to history yet once a vital source of employment.
Tracks like The Far Set and El Garrotin add extra weight and focus on the combined alchemy of piper John McSherry, Donal O’Connor’s fiddle and guitarist Sean Og Gra- ham, underpinned by Duke Special’s piano work furthering the collective tightness. The resulting sound is rich, compelling and full. Using native texts with strong distinctive arrangements and Duke Special’s laconic yet unmistakably Belfast brogue, A Note Let Go rings with accomplishment and pride of place.
www.ulaidmusic.com John O’Regan
CHRIS STOUT & CATRIONA MCKAY Bare Knuckle Bare Knuckle Music BKM01CD
Experimentalist Shetland fiddler Chris Stout and avant-garde harpist Catriona McKay released their previous album as a duo seven years ago. Bare Knuckle reflects the ground- breaking musical work they’ve both done since then, and reveals the distance they’ve travelled musically. Their relationship with Scottish traditional music has become more tangential, complex and creative. Almost all the pieces on this album are compositions by Stout and/or McKay that draw on Scottish musical tradition and mix it with other ele- ments. These dynamic compositions conjure musical moodscapes more akin to jazz and chamber classical ensembles than to most Scottish folk music. The duo’s playing is so fast and technically proficient, the music they create sounds like more than two people.
The title track Bare Knuckle has muscu-
lar, impetuous, energetic playing. You can feel the traction of the horsehair bow and the percussive pluck of fingers on strings. Seeker Reaper expands, elaborates and extemporises traditional-sounding musical phrases to create a fluid folk-jazz composi- tion. The interweaving fiddle and harp use contrasting and complementary rhythms, tunes and counter-tunes in a process of con- tinual musical embroidery.
The intense frenetic pieces are juxta- posed with slower, atmospheric ones. Louise’s Waltz is a many-faceted meditation on bereavement, a mini-suite running through a gamut of musical textures and emotions. The evocative Tingaholm evinces a Nordic influ- ence on Stout’s wailing, keening fiddle, pro- ducing that distinctive spine-tingling sound like whale-song or the cry of the seals. The harp adds a shimmering web of notes that glisten like ice-crystals.
Time To Retreat takes traditional-sound- ing phrases through such inventive variation, rhythmically and melodically, that the whole composition takes on a semi-classical or new- age jazz quality. The album’s concluding piece, Bachianas Brasileiras No 4 Preludio (by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos) gives an indication of where Stout and McKay are now, musically. Villa-Lobos does not feel out of place here. You can feel that it’s composed by someone other than Stout or McKay, but organically the piece is congruent with the rest of the album: thoughtful, intricate and absorbing.
mckaystoutmusic.co.uk Paul Matheson THE LEVELLERS
We The Collective On The Fiddle Recordings OTFCD029P
Happy 30th to The Levellers. Is it really that long ago they roared around the country in a clapped-out old van spreading songs of toler- ance, justice and individuality? So to mark their anniversary they’ve employed a string section to add a different perspective to old faves and a couple of new tracks, all unplugged. Mind you this is posh unplugged, having been laid down in the hallowed halls of Abbey Road, all under the watchful eye of former Stone Roses supervisor John Leckie.
The Levellers and a string section? I mean they do crash about the place a bit and string sections are usually so pastoral and refined, so perhaps you’re right to ask the question. The answer is though that when the Levellers say unplugged they mean it, the songs are stripped right back and from what I hear proceedings are as acoustic as they could be, which brings in another question: do the two sections marry up? You have to say yes they do. Particularly on Hope Street, whose social conscience lyric applies even more in 2018, as we race headlong into a time of self- and blind denial, “there’s a young boy in a queue, not much else for him to do, dear old lady looking thin, shopping bag with your life in,” sings Mark Chadwick against gritty strings and strums. Sound familiar?
The Shame hammers the point home, “important to note the waters they choked in were international, the promise of freedom we gave, as a world we do nothing and silently let them die”. The lyrics are brutal and show no compromise, the guitar is chopped and stacatto, the violas and violins are sour; it’s an impressive piece of polemic. Drug Bust McGee is a bittersweet tale of no doubt personal experience, good cop, bad cop, you take your pick. England My Home cruises on a hoedown banjo amidst an acous- tic, almost bucolic setting which is ironic given the interrogative lines, “what hap- pened to my green and pleasant land?” A lot of it got concreted over. The battles of yester- day may seem long ago but battles carry on, now it’s fracking. That continuing, defiant, rallying cry One Way is here curated into a string-swept whirlpool of gravitas with its power intact and the message to be yourself loud and clear.
The Levellers have done it their way for 30 years and still produce albums every bit as dynamic and vibrant, even those without electricity.
levellers.co.uk Simon Jones Chris Stout & Catriona McKay
THE BULGARIAN VOICES ANGELITE
Passion – Mysticism – Delight Jaro JARO 4341-2
A glossy-packaged two-CD compilation from albums by the part of the Bulgarian Radio women’s choir that in 1987 first recorded for Jaro. They toured worldwide with the name Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, until 1995 when they were renamed The Bulgarian Voices Angelite after legal conflict with Marcel Celli- er. The latter had in the 1970s stimulated international awareness of these Bulgarian female voices by releasing recordings on his Disques Cellier label, under that Le Mystère… title, picked up in the UK in the ‘80s by 4AD.
The first CD is just the choir (occasionally joined by four fine, unfortunately here un- named, instrumentalists who were part of the ensemble early on), in tracks taken large- ly from that first album – the live Cathedral Concert – and subsequent 1990s releases.
CD number two is some of their collabo- rations with international guests. On the face of it, these could appear a striving for a wider audience, but it hasn’t been easy for these choirs to continue since the end of the Bul- garian communist regime. This certainly restricted their international movement and administered with a heavy hand, but did sup- port them with salaries and recordings..
However, viewed purely as music, with- out hankering for the delight and amaze- ment of first encountering the Bulgarian radio recordings, there’s genuine communica- tion and creativity going on in most of these tracks which include live or studio work with Enrique Morente; Eddie Jobson’s deep elec- tric violin; Dona Rosa (a surprisingly strong vocal from her); Balkan chug from the Bojan Ristic Brass Band and Fanfare Ciocarlia; a slight touch of Bobby McFerrin and Huun- Huur-Tuu’s Tuvan throat-singing with The Moscow Art Trio; and Germany-based early- music group Sarband here playing very much in the Bulgarian kaval-led instrumental style. The track with Turkey’s Sezen Aksu has some dated beatiness, but far worse is the sadly teeth-grating closer, an Italian-led pop cut-up attempt with Elio E Le Storie Tese from 1992’s From Bulgaria With Love.
Whatever the politics and adventures,
it’s hard to think of any other choirs that have so excited musicians and listeners worldwide as these Bulgarian ones, with their unique, glorious, edgy-voiced, close-interval, often asymmetric-rhythm music, even if sometimes there have been some rather tacky involve- ments and marketing. For me the floppy- sleeved LPs released by Bulgarian state label Balkanton in the early 1970s of various choirs, were the first, and remain the biggest, thrill. But time moves on, and big changes in Bul- garia, the need for artistic exploration, and indeed for keeping the choirs alive, has prompted and opened new avenues.
www.jaro.de Andrew Cronshaw
JOGLARESA Sing We Yule Jogleresa JOG007
The exquisite harmony singing of the open- ing track suggests that we are in for a musical feast and so it proves.
Joglaresa are generally regarded as being in an area that straddles the classical and early music scene; certainly that is where most of their appearances occur. However, their biog- raphy starts with the quotation that they are “Early music’s ‘bit of rough’”. This really enjoyable album shows that they enjoy blend- ing a wide range of musical traditions and genres in their performance. Take their singing for instance; each of the 21 tracks
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