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Written in fRoots issue 331/332, 2011
 

MATS EDÉN, DANIEL SANDÉN-WARG, LEIF STINNERBOM, MAGNUS STINNERBOM
Anno 2010
Giga GCD-73 (2010)

Downloads, pah! With many roots and traditional music CDs, and especially Giga’s many releases, the booklet notes go beyond the sound, revealing the world of the music and its players. Here Mats Edén and Leif Stinnerbom, founders of one of Sweden’s most influential folk bands, Groupa, tell the colourful tale of their quest, beginning in the early 1970s, for the old musics and fiddlers, particularly those of their region, Värmland.
     And, as with some British folk-musical families, the next generation has also grasped the baton and run with it. As teenagers, Leif’s son Magnus and Daniel Sandén-Warg (who has also become a top player of the music of Norway’s Setesdal) made an album called Harv, which became the name of their duo and subsequently led to more albums and a band. Magnus, as well as spending several years with Hedningarna and current membership of the Ale Möller Band, gathered his contemporaries a couple of years ago as the Outhouse Allstars, originally to play the music of Groupa for his dad’s birthday celebration.
     Now the generations come together in the Outhouse studio, playing the old tunes – polskas, waltzes, rejländers, halling - from the preceding generations of fiddlers, plus a few of their own, and the booklet notes tell stories about them too.
     For some they play all together, for some they split into duos, trio or solo, on fiddles, the sympathetic-stringed viola d’amore and violin d’amore whose incorporation into Swedish folk music have stemmed largely from the work of these musicians, or adding in moraharpa, diatonic accordion and harmonica. No bass instruments, just the dense textures of all those harmonising and droning bowed strings and wheezing reeds, and massive drive.
     Their note to a polska from Lejsme-Per captures the spirit: “A music full of porridge and poverty, but also strength and an irrepressible longing for beauty”.

www.giga.w.se


© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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