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Written in Folk Roots issue 145, 1995

AVADÅ BAND
Chateau Vadå
Amalthea (MNW) CDAM 88 (1994)

CALLE HERNMARCK & STEN ANDERSSON
Ekon från Vallskogen
Twin Music TMCD 19 (1994)

NILS AGENMARK
Nils Agenmark
GIGA GCD-12 (1995)

PERS HANS OLSSON
Frihetens Långdans
GIGA GCD-13 (1988)

Avadå Band was formed ten years ago by reeds-player Dan “Gisen” Malmqvist and guitarist Lars Bomgren, who were both members of Filarfolket. This band has a bass-and-drums rhythm section, and more similarity in approach to the best and subtlest of the rockier English ceilidh bands than to either straight folk-rock or to Filarfolket. (That’s just a rough indicator; much of this is somewhere else again). Chateau Vadå, the fourth album, shows the band still moving forward; it’s strong, assured, varied, inventive, and full of skilful playing, swing and lift, drawing on wider influences but bringing them to bear on music with that floating-on-air quality of Swedish dancing. No fiddler, in fact no dominant lead instrument (one of the reasons for its variety of texture), no vocals, but definite tunes, new and traditional.

      On Ekon från Vallskogen Calle Hernmarck and Sten Andersson set out to do what some people seem to think all folk music is trying to do - evoke the past. Of course, we all know it isn’t, don’t we? Anyway, to this end they play traditional tunes on the instruments of a bygone era - goathorns, shepherds’ pipes and baroque fiddles, supported by samples including flies and other natural sounds - to capture the atmosphere of the music played at the summer pastures to which Swedish farming households moved annually with their livestock in the times when the majority of people worked on the land. The effect is rather more polyphonically arranged than the actual music would have been, and resounding with limpid echoes, but avowedly they’re trying to get at some sort of atmosphere. The approach could work well, but here the result appears a series of snatches of underexplored melody, stiffly played and lacking in flow, in a floatation tank of reverb. I guess it either makes pictures for you or it doesn’t.

      From Giga come two more albums of the deep fiddle tradition that underlies much of Sweden’s current musical upsurge. The edgy tone, twisting tunes and surging, wiggly style shown, at least when this was recorded (in 1987; he died last year aged 79) to extreme by Nils Agenmark can, let’s be honest, make much solo Swedish fiddling hard for the listener to get into.
      A younger fiddler also recorded in 1987 when he was aged 45, Pers Hans Olsson, here with a set of his own tunes, the tradition advancing by new composition, has a more soaring, smooth sound, still with many turns but not as many as Agenmark, and more clearly structured double-stopping, so the twisting tunes are easier to grasp.
     Both represent aspects, indeed generations, of a tradition founded on regional styles and preferences - Olsson comes from Rättvik in Dalarna, Agenmark from further north in Hälsingland; each’s idea of beauty is conditioned by what he’s heard all his life. Whatever, the key is dance and enjoyment, so anyone drawn to this music shouldn’t feel they have to plunge early on straight into albums like these - it’s well worth a try, but there are other entry points. It’s important, though, that such recordings should be available to show the music’s living heart to those with ears to hear and hands to play. And with repeated listening, as one hears past the surface texture, the meaning starts to clarify.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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