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Written in fRoots issue 349, 2012


ELS BERROS DE LA CORT
Los Nòstres Vices e Pecats
Nufolk NF013 (2012)

POTIR
Gothic City
Sketis SKMR-089 (2012)

The playing of music from 14th-century European manuscripts is often the domain of ensembles within the classical music world using reconstructed instruments, or of jolly minstrelish be-tighted mock-medievalist combos. Both of these CDs cut through that with something much grittier and involvingly immersive.
     Els Berros De La Cort do dress up like extras from Game Of Thrones - lots of leather, studs, feathers and bare torsos – but they do it well, and given that they’re at root a bunch of street performers that’s a fair enough way of getting an audience. But when I saw them a couple of albums ago doing a stage show at Manresa festival in their homeland of Catalunya the actual musical material among the smoke and sweat theatricals was fairly mainstream early-music, and the 2006 and 2008 CDs, while energetic and shouty, didn’t impress. But I’d been told the new one is a step forward, and indeed it is.
     Actually, on the CD package there’s no dressing-up, in fact there are no clothes. It’s full of grainy erotic photos, with a remarkably unsettling anatomically ambiguous front cover shot. And recipes. It all relates to the album’s theme of lust and gluttony, in which they draw on texts from 14th century Catalan manuscripts, particularly the oldest preserved cookery treatise Llibre De Sent Sovi and the sex manual Speculum Al Foder, setting them to music largely derived and developed from the repertoires of the 12th-14thC Catalan and Occitan troubadours.
     They’ve certainly worked a lot on the actual music for this one, in both material and treatment. It’s strong and interesting in melody, playing and ingenious but natural in arrangement. Rather than historical reconstructions, they play instruments that have long histories but are used today in Catalan folk music: long tarota shawms and their smaller kin gralla, both of which are lead instruments in a Catalan cobla, plus hurdy-gurdy and the Catalan bagpipe sac de gemecs, with a through-flow of rhythmic propulsion, driven by mandola or saz and underpinned by leathery drums, that gets inside the tunes and doesn’t resort to obvious beats and is hefty but without bombast.
     The singing, male and female, at times harmonising acapella, is direct and unaffected, without any pretensions to an imagined ‘medieval’ sound. Sometimes the texts are spoken over the music, again unpretentiously in natural voices. No medievalist exercise, it’s music for today, and succeeds in that with no overt modernising features that would date it.

     Potir’s Gothic City, too, uses musical and textual material from medieval Catalunya, particularly the 14th-century Llibre Vermell De Montserrat, the Red Book Of Montserrat, which is still kept at the monastery on the landmark jagged rock outcrop near Manresa.
    The instruments – bagpipes, breathy flutes, whistles, jew’s-harp, psaltery, dutar, peasant lute, drums and other percussion – while they have long histories are chosen primarily for their ability to create the sound-picture rather than academic authenticity. And from the street-scene hubbub, skirling bagpipes and resonant drumming of the opening track onwards most of them are played by one person, and he’s not from Catalunya, he’s Russian: Andrey Nazarov.
     As well as a multi-instrumentalist, he’s a graphic artist, making rather fine drawings in broadly Albrecht Dürer style territory, and the album, in whose booklet a selection appear, was begun as a project to make a musical panorama of the Middle Ages to go with them. So, unlike the Els Berros album, it does aim to create a medieval sound, but it’s no concert-hallish thing; it’s as alive with pictures and incidental sounds as a well-made film.
     Hard as it is to believe (and I’m still wondering), unless some are uncredited or some of the people listed under “Our gratitude to” pitched in, Nazarov seems to be doing all the varied singing and other voices (though presumably not all in the crowd-scene hubbub), except for touches to three tracks of equally right and un-artsy female vocals of an Arabic slant by Razana Rustom. It sounds, as does his playing, like a whole bunch of different people interacting in a real place. The fact that it must have taken a lot of single-minded work in the studio never shows, and however it was done, it is indeed remarkable tour-de-force making a vivid soundscape.

www.elsberrosdelacort.cat
www.sketismusic.ru


© 2012 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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