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Cocos Lovers


mid section and I’m both intrigued and entranced. What goes on here?


Very brief background then: a Deal- based collective who clearly delight in any- thing and everything as inspiration, yet retaining a sense of perspective, common sense and their own backyard. This is album number three and leads their other Cocos offerings by a country mile. Like Cornwall’s Odd Folk, the Cocos Lovers operate in a space beyond simple musical boundaries and aren therefore ideal for those of us who want melodic adventures or bold experiments in their listening.


Meanwhile back on Gold Or Dust their quiet crusading continues. Emily is a ghostly piece thanks to the banshee vibes of musical saw that runs through a particularly nice sheet of wyrdfolk inspiration echoing Hedge- hog Pie; the same piece is reprised later as an a cappella hymn. Track eight proves that the best is buried inside: Son Of A Merchant has David Hatton’s dancing tribal lead guitar, Sally Army brass, boy/girl vocal gymnastics and endemic shuffles. It’s a carnival of hybrids yet straight out of the greenwood. Are they through yet? Of course not, Hollow Is The Ground clocks in at fourteen minutes, a quiet introspection mulling over experiences and relatives long gone which morphs into a driv- ing, pumping rock’n’reel mash up that sounds as if it’s been dreamed up in a green meadow.


The world is indeed their oyster.Such flir- tatious and audacious tunes can be sourced from www.smugglersrecords.com


Simon Jones JUURI & JUURI


Fiddlers / Quiet Rapture Ääniä AANIA 23 A/B


A double album by Finns Emilia Lajunen and Eero Grund- ström, who have been playing togeth-


er for a decade alongside other projects such as Grundström in Sväng and both in Spon- taani Vire.


One disc, Hiljainen Haltioituminen


(Quiet Rapture), is duet arrangements by Lajunen on fiddle or nyckelharpa and Grund- ström on harmonium or harmonica of materi- al from two books of folk music collector AO Väisänen’s early 20th Century field-transcrip-


tions from solo players of kantele (in this case mostly not the iconic five-string version, but larger with ten to thirty strings), three string jouhikko (bowed lyre), and shepherd’s flutes or animal horns.


They dig deep into the possibilities of the material, which isn’t so much tunes with beginning, middle and end but slices of the music-making of particular solo musicians playing to amuse themselves and perhaps those around them. The disc peaks with a gorgeous, serenity-inducing nine-minute interpretation of an Ingrian lullaby in which they also borrow harmonically from Shostakovich.


While the music on Quiet Rapture has its original instrumentation and roots in an archaic layer of European musical culture, the other disc deals with material with a much shorter history: the Finnish manifestations of dance musical forms that spread across Europe over the last two or three centuries, developing instrumental styles where they took root. The tunes on Pelimannit (Fiddlers) come mostly from the repertoires of now- deceased 20th Century fiddlers, plus a sung wedding hymn, a “pitch-black suicidal” song learnt from Finnish Roma singer Hilja Grön- fors and a Swedish wedding polska by Väsen’s Olov Johansson with Roger Tallroth’s guitar accompaniment reworked for harmonium.


Their arranging and playing is very fine indeed. Their mission statement on the book- let notes, though, is a tad contentious. “To counterbalance the usual pop-ified folk, we wanted to go to the roots of the tunes to find the power in them. We can’t jump into the boots of a fiddler from a century ago, but we can resist making an arrangement even before playing out the original music.” OK, fine, but they add “We recorded this album in a way that the cover could say ‘No pop music added’”.


“The usual pop-ified folk”? Hard to dis- cern substantial or all-pervading evidence of current mainstream pop on the Finnish folk scene; and they themselves jokingly acknowledge in the note to a Viljami Niit- tykoski tune, “We have upper crust people hiding under our folksy appearance. This bourgeois tinge nevertheless won’t stop us from using some Hammond tone clusters”. Have cake, will also eat?


Good cake, though. www.aania.fi


Andrew Cronshaw


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