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Written in fRoots issue 202, 2000
 

ANNBJØRG LIEN
Baba Yaga
Grappa GRCD 4158 (1999)

1989’s Annbjørg, featuring traditional Norwegian tunes played on Hardanger fiddle surrounded by innovative arrangements by the Brazz Bros’ Helge Førde, wasn’t her first album, but it was the one that marked Annbjørg Lien out as a progressive. The elegant Felefeber followed, and then with 1996’s Prisme she found her tune-writing muse and the strengths of collaboration with Bjørn Ole Rasch. For Baba Yaga he is again keyboardist/programmer and now also co-writer, and together they head deeper into the dense groves of Nordic drone-rock, wherein there are still many new paths, outcrops and clearings to be discovered.
      The result takes them even further away from the idea of a fiddler’s album as simply a set of tunes variously accompanied to something much freer, less instrument-tied, and it’s a powerful work. Like fresh green branches from between boulders, shapely, airy melodies spring from big, rich, menacing sounds, satisfyingly full-blooded, and when it needs to be this is as hefty as Hedningarna or Hoven Droven. It’s no straight-ahead groove, though; it pauses, looks around, glimpses with the corner of the eye. In, for example, the turns of the tune Old Larry, and in its interpolated scratchy snatches of fiddling like a field recording, perhaps there’s a creased yellowing photo of fiddlers at a Swedish-Finnish crown wedding.
      Voices feature this time; Annbjørg’s enters pleasingly pitch-unexpectedly and strident against the opening atmospherics of the first track, before even the bowing starts, and later the serene Astra is almost a song. On Ája guest Ailo Gaup grinds out a deep vocal drone sounding somewhere between Tuva and his Sámi joik tradition, and Inoque is intro’d by the voices of children in Mozambique, recorded on Bukkene Bruse’s trip there for Save the Children.
      Though Lien is primarily a player of Hardanger fiddle, here as on Prisme her nyckelharpa is much used, either alone or tracking under the hardingfele to give a rich, deep sympathetic-stringed melody-line sonority in places reminiscent, as are some of the tunes, of Väsen. That Swedish band’s guitar, mandola and bouzouki player Roger Tallroth is a member of the core team, together again with drummer Rune Arnesen, and Hans Fredrik Jacobsen on bagpipe, oud, Meråker clarinet and flutes. The latter include the seljefløyte whose natural harmonics float through the final track, W., a tribute in brurmarsj style to the great fiddler from Gudbrandsdal, the late Hans W. Brimi; its beautiful stately theme emerges at last like the lapping of calm wavelets after a storm.


© 2000 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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