f124
ATALYJA Atalyja + 4 Kuku SMF 0078
To celebrate their twenty-year existence, here’s a re-release, plus four extra tracks, of the 2000 debut album by pioneering ten- piece Lithuanian roots band Atalyja. I could just flag this up in ‘And The Rest’, but it’s a strong, unusual and present-day-sounding album that deserves a new and wider audi- ence. What I wrote back then still holds true, so here’s the essence.
As with the older aspects of the tradi- tional musics of other parts of the region of the Baltic and eastwards – Finno-Ugrian runo-song and Latvian vocal music, for exam- ple – Atalyja’s traditional song melodies, mainly seasonal songs and the hypnotic poly- phonic songs of interlocking overlaid lines known as sutartines, are very narrow in com- pass, virtually never straying outside a repeated short sequence made from the first five notes of a diatonic minor scale, and they often use fewer, frequently just four, some- times only two.
The band has the task of enveloping these tunes, so minimal they’re almost akin to the patterns of Western once-avant-garde systems music, in an instrumental, arranging and production garb that communicates with a present-day audience.
They do it by suspending the song, deliv- ered variously by five singers, female and male, in a kind of weary moderate yell (I don’t mean that badly) over a bass guitar pat- tern, and adding in the other instruments – kankles (the Lithuanian equivalent of Finnish kantele), bagpipes, fiddle, viola, flute, skudu- ciai (unassembled panpipes), guitar, tabla and drums – in overlapping figures or suggestions of canon. The warm, looping basslines have a crucial role somewhat akin to Hughes de Courson’s in early Malicorne. Indeed, the grainy instrumental textures strike parallels with those of the French band, which like Atalyja created a modern but not jollifying or simplistically syncopating expression for a body of traditional material.
The four extra tracks, recorded in 2002, 2011 and 2015, fit well on the end of an already very varied, colourful set of approaches. They include a hefty fuzzed folk- rock treatment of a call-and-response youths’ Christmas visiting song, and funky wah-wah set against grainy viola in the winding, slith- ering treatment of the closer Two Doves.
atalyja.com
Andrew Cronshaw Fran & Flora
GWILYM BOWEN RHYS
Detholiad O Hen Faledi – A Selection Of Old Welsh Ballads Recordiau Erwydd, ER001
Brought up in Welsh-speaking Snowdonia, singing at Eisteddfodau, Gwilym is well- known for his previous work with Welsh-lan- guage rock band Y Bandana and alt-folk trio, Plu. This album of forgotten pearls of Welsh- language balladry from the 18th and 19th centuries is the fruit of Gwilym’s research in the National Library of Wales. The album includes songs in praise of sex and whisky, and ballads composed by professional ballad- singers who travelled Wales attending coun- try fairs and markets, singing their ballads and selling them as printed ballad sheets.
These songs provide a correction to the Methodist-Calvinist self-image of Wales. Sev- eral ballads depict a lusty, bucolic Welsh tradi- tional culture that has been somewhat air- brushed out of Welsh social history. The bright tone of Gwilym’s singing, with an occa- sional pop-rock inflection, reveals his relish at reclaiming these traditional Welsh songs of wit and ribaldry.
Gwilym expresses a sharper criticism of the puritanism of Wales’s past, when he sings unaccompanied the one well-known song on the album: Yr Eneth Gadd Ei Gwrthod (The Rejected Maiden). It tells the true story of Jane Williams, who became pregnant after being raped and subsequently became the object of shame and discrimination by the community. She drowned herself in the river Dee at the age of 23.
Gwilym has a fine voice, with crystal- clear diction, and he performs here either unaccompanied or with just an acoustic gui- tar, which makes it easy to learn these songs. I have no doubt that this album will increase the Welsh folk repertoire among today’s singers.
sbrigynymborth.com Paul Matheson
FRAN & FLORA Unfurl Fran & Flora
Any act citing the great Manouche violinist Tcha Limberger as a mentor and inspiration is worthy of further investigation. And the debut release from violinist Flora Curzon and cellist Francesca Ter-Berg does not disappoint. “London’s best-kept secret” really should be
more widely known, and even revered for its captivating, quasi-mystical, meditative sum- moning of landscape, tradition and beauty. This is a lost, often Eastern European, other world, of fragile and filigreed klezmer, Roma music and much else besides. And the whole is perfectly wrapped in a spectrally pencilled cover of bare trees by Oscar-garlanded Lord of the Rings artist, Alan Lee.
The album’s most significant achieve- ment is its convolution of personal story and influence. Talking Trees is an appropriately organic excavation, from “a dark Thracian tune” that the duo learned and connected with in Crete. Strings are washed in subtle electronica to create a low ebb and hum, above which gentle soloing and beseeching vocals recreate a warm darkness out of time. Listen to the trees talking with your eyes closed, the duo suggest.
In late-night experimentation and resig-
nation, riffs and motifs rapidly circle out of the darkness and into an uneasy electronica calm of elemental weather and desperate melancholy. This approach unearths new and telling details in laments from Transylvania and in Jewish music recorded onto wax cylin- der by lost violin and cimbalom maestros in early twentieth-century Russia. Romanian Fantasies is an example of the latter, two fragile excerpts from a larger suite played with a sweep of detail and invention, startling and percussive cello replacing cim- balom in a lyrical, emotionally broken and timeless reinterpretation.
A compressed and arresting vision of love and death and nature and time.
franandflora.com John Pheby ANDREW CADIE
Half-Witted, Merry & Mad Steeplejack SJCD022
In the front of the 18th-century book of manuscript tunes of William Vickers is a poem from which this extract is taken (original spelling): Musicians are half witted mery and mad / And those are the same that admire them / They'r Fools if they Play unless their Well Paid / And the Others are Blockheads to Hire them.
Pausing only to reflect on how well these words describe all my friends and associates, we return to the tunes from the Vickers manuscript and the majestic way they are treated here. Newcastle was the presumed home of the man who put together nearly 600 tunes and the collection reflects the good sea and land connections of the city, as tunes of Scots and Irish origin mingle with the local Northumbrian pieces. Andrew's selection reflects the wide variety of rhythms, styles keys and modes that the collection offers.
Apart from one track where he offers a fiddle song, the only sound we hear is the totally isolated sound of the solo fiddle. Everything about his approach and playing tells us that it can stand up to this level of exposure. Clearly, he has examined the possi- bilities of each tune and then given it the sort of treatment that it calls for.
As well as being an exceptional fiddler, Andrew also is a very experienced record pro- ducer with his own studio in his base in Ger- many, and it was there that he produced his own album. He was also responsible for the album's art design; every aspect is of the highest quality. It will be surprising if this album does not become a classic of English fiddle playing.
andrewcadie.de Vic Smith
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
