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Written in Folk Roots (when it was Southern Rag) issue 82, 1990
 

ANNBJØRG LIEN
Annbjorg
Kirkelig Kulturverksted FXLP 88 (also CD)

If you've never heard Swedish or Norwegian dance music or, like me, are attracted by the idea and sound of it but sometimes have difficulty figuring out what's going on rhythmically, this is the record for us both. In many ways it does for this music what the rather more exuberantly approximate Morris On once did for English morris music. Annbjørg Lien, a fine 19 year-old Norwegian hardingfele and nyckelharpa player, works with excellent musicians from other disciplines to get inside tunes whatever way they suggest. With her sympathetic-stringed Hardanger, keyed nyckelharpa and standard four-string fiddles are flutes, electric guitar, sax, clarinets, cello, contrabassoon and percussion over a synth bass.
      The arrangements, tending to jazz-rock in style, are always tight and melodic and the tunes, among them hallings, springars, marches and polkas, are paramount: it's a genuine and successful attempt to explore, understand and interpret often subtle and rhythmically complex traditional material, as was, for example, early Steeleye Span (unlike some of the superficial and rhythmically restricted later phases of folk-rock). Pardon comparisons with British music, but it seems to me that Scandinavia is going through some of the same stages in the development of its traditional musics, but, being a different culture, should produce contrasting results.
      The sleeve credits all arrangements to jazz trombonist Helge Førde of the Brazz Brothers.. It sounds as if a mixture of parts pre-composed and developed in the studio was used, and for me the best results are where the players seem to have been asked to play what they feel, perhaps within an overall structure. I think I might have preferred occasionally to hear a real bass: the synth, well played though it is, suggests calmly controlled machines rather than sweating, insanitary human beings.
Whatever, this is the most accessible, instantly enjoyable Scandinavian fiddle record I've yet heard.


© 1990 Andrew Cronshaw



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