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Written in fRoots issue 357, March 2013


FARMERS MARKET
Slav To The Rhythm
Division DIVREC CD019 (2012)

1: Farmers Market (no apostrophe) is a brilliant band. 2: Brilliant bands don’t always make brilliant records. 3: I don’t say this often, but this is a brilliant record.
      I generally try to give some idea of what an album sounds like, but there’s so much here. The gorgeousness of Bulgarian instrumental and vocal music, the heftiness of metal, the deft slinging around of beats and squee of the unlauded finest of ’80s jazz-rock, Zappa-ish wit, all rolled into a completely balanced, incalculably ingenious, exciting and spirits-lifting whole; a Balkan Area Code 615, and that’s high praise.
      At the heart of FM is Stian Carstensen, who’s that very rare personage, a genuine multi-instrumentalist playing completely disparate instruments with more skill and compositional inventiveness than most musicians playing only one of them: electric guitars and their necked kin pedal steel, electric sitar and banjo, button-accordion, kaval, ocarina, violin, organs, Moog and other keyboards.
      He’s joined in the band, together since the 1990s, by fellow Norwegians of equal astonishing hotness: guitarist Nils-Olav Johansen, bassist Finn Guttormsen, drummer Jarle Vespestad and Bulgarian saxist Trifon Trifonov. For the album they’ve brought in from Bulgaria three female singers, and players of gadulka and clarinet, plus from Norway and elsewhere harp, tabla, strings, panpipes, French horn and more.
      Smart title too! (Ah yes, flashback to Grace Jones and the hula-hoop, high point of the Royal Jubilee concert).

www.divisionrec.com


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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