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Written in
fRoots
issue 365, Nov 2013
MATS EDÉN
Pastern
Gammalthea SEWJN 17 (2013)
Mats Edén is, and has been since the 1970s, an absolutely key figure in the
energy and evolution of Sweden’s folk music. The core and main composer of
Groupa, collaborator with many other leading musicians, and to be found at the
heart of the most intense buskspel clusters of musicians at spelmansstämmor, the
new music flows out of him as he deeply explores, masters and revels in the
stretched relationship between rhythmic pulse and melody in Swedish and
Norwegian dance music.
On Pastern he rounds up twenty-six tunes from
throughout his life, about half of them his own, the rest traditional, some
learnt from 1910-20 recordings. He plays them on solo fiddle, viola d’amore,
viola, hardanger fiddle or one-row melodeon, occasionally tracking his own duet
part, and, if you let the CD run on after the last track, a burst of mad
diddling.
Simple, it might seem, but there’s so much going on
within the music rhythmically and in double-stopping. There’s a rich seam here
for any fiddler, and any classically-educated violinist who reckons they know it
all should hear the stuff on this CD, listened to perhaps back-to-back with
Bach’s and Bartók’s solo violin pieces.
www.matseden.se
© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
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