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Written in Folk Roots issue 198, 1999
 

PER GUDMUNDSON, ALE MÖLLER, LENA WILLEMARK
Frifot
ECM 1690 557 653-2 (1999)

Confusing. Frifot by Möller, Willemark & Gudmundson was released in 1991 on the Swedish label Caprice, and its title became their group name. It was followed by 1996’s Järven. Now, on ECM, the label for which Möller and Willemark made the ballad-centred albums Nordan and Agram, here’s album number three, called, er, Frifot.
      Like the other Frifot albums this one features just the trio, with no guests, playing pretty much as they do live. The core sounds are Willemark’s magnificently intense singing, and her and Gudmundson’s fiddles interweaving with extraordinary empathy with melodic counter-lines and rhythmic stresses of Möller’s mandola. The latter switches variously to small harp, shawm, whistles and wild chiming hammered dulcimer, and for one track Gudmundson plays the Swedish bagpipe he’s been instrumental in reviving.
      I’ve been having a problem writing this review; Frifot is a group whose live shows fill me with delight and awe, but despite many listens, and accepting that it’s only a recording, this leaves me a bit unmoved. Certainly the performances, a mix of tunes and songs, traditional and strong new-made by each of the trio (Möller’s waltz Metaren a particularly attractive melody), are as powerful as ever, but the album seems to stand aloof. Maybe the sound is a contributing factor. Producer Manfred Eicher’s first encounter with Frifot was in a church, and so perhaps for him that ambience is part of their magic, but the potential impact of the three-voice acapella in the opening track, Abba Fader (no, not them, it’s a song from the former Swedish outpost on the Estonian island of Runö, and the only track in which we hear Möller and Gudmundson’s voices), is somewhat diminished by a distancing, cathedralic reverb with a very long tail. That certainly works better in the set of herding calls and tunes of track three, Lena’s tight-throated high-pitched kulning over Ale’s breathy whistle and Per’s octave fiddle, but the reverbs tend to be evocative of hard walls or the studio, not an airy outdoor place, and even on the drier, more meaty and upfront tracks the sound tends to a rather cold edgy stridency.
      But even if it were recorded down a telephone line from a coal cellar it’d still be clear that this a key group in developing from gnarled but still sappy roots fresh present-day north European musical growth.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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