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Written in
fRoots
issue 300, 2008
FRIFOT
Flyt
Amigo AMCD 762 (2007)
The essence of the present-day energy of Swedish living-traditional music is
distilled in Frifot, the long-established trio comprising magnificent
traditional singer and fiddler Lena Willemark, great Dalarna fiddler and bagpipe
pioneer Per Gudmundson and poly-active multi-instrumentalist Ale Möller.
It’s a thrill and a revelation to watch these
three in action, a magnetic, witty, dynamic tour de force, their music and their
body-language united in communication with one another and the audience as they
revel in the impelling, lurching rhythms and knife-edge-balancing microtones of
instrumental music, and the intimate breathy warmth and sky-ringing wildness of
Willemark’s intense, passionate solo vocals, with the guys joining her in
powerful dense-textured group harmonies.
Möller’s uniquely gutty, propulsive mandola is a
sound that has shaped so much Swedish music through the years. No Celtic steady
tickity-strum but a surging, leaping thing leaving tense chasms of pause as it
underpins and weaves through the dark abrasiveness or ecstatic silvery ring of
Gudmundson and Willemark’s twin fiddles or violas in mighty tunes that hesitate,
pivot and swerve, rich with rhythmic incident. On some tracks he moves to
breathy traditional whistles, the mellow plaintiveness of cow-horn or skirling,
edgy shawm.
There’s all of that on this new album, twenty
tracks of strong material, some of it traditional, some the compositions of
Möller and Willemark, with lyrics from tradition, Swedish poets and
Swedish-language versions of writings by Charles d’Orleans, Michelangelo and
Shakespeare. The eccentric swing of Dalarna polska is a strong influence as
always in the tunes and the feel of the playing, but there’s a lot of melodic
and rhythmic variety, including a reappearance of one of the many Möller
compositions that have entered the tradition, Sommarvalsen, this time as
a song using a text by Skåne poet Gabriel Jönsson.
However good a CD is, though, and this one is -
perhaps a hint more reverb-sparkle could have enhanced, though playing it
room-fillingly loudish helps - no mere audio has really captured Frifot. To
really get it one has to see them live. (I witnessed the Damascene conversion of
this magazine’s editor, who emerged shining-eyed and cover-feature commissioning
from a Frifot performance in Albuquerque a few years ago). For those not so
fortunate, a live CD and/or DVD, should they ever release one, would go some way
to conveying their impact.
© 2008
Andrew Cronshaw
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