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Written in Folk Roots issue 178, 1998

GJALLARHORN
Ranarop - Call Of The Sea Witch
Warner Finlandia Innovator 0630-19627-2 (1997)

A couple of years ago at Kaustinen, a festival not afflicted with didjeridoo-players at every turn, the sight of one such on stage prompted visions of the first distant roaring of an impending groan-tube invasion.
      But Gjallarhorn’s blend of twin fiddles, or fiddle and viola, with didj and djembe in its Finnish-Swedish music worked as if it had always been intended. It makes the sort of cohesive sound, driving bows and ringing open strings with rippling, grinding drone and a deep heartbeat, usually associated with electric bands. The bass and rhythm section of didj with djembe, played at that time and on the album by Jakob Frankenhaeuser (since replaced by the equally effective Tommi Mansikka-Aho), is completed by David Lillkvist’s precise, responsive percussion.
      The two fine fiddlers are Christopher Öhman, who also provides viola, mandola and backing vocals, and Jenny Wilhelms, whose silvery-clear voice cuts and dives microtonally in classic Swedish traditional singing style, and soars into the occasional kulning.
      The band is Finnish, but coming from a Swedish-speaking area of west-coast Finland its language and music is Swedish in character, and most of the material here (apart from a Norwegian stev and a setting of a Finnish runo-lyric) was collected by 19th and 20th century researchers from traditional singers in western Finland and the islands of the Gulf of Bothnia, where parts of the Swedish song tradition persisted that had died out in Sweden itself. This material has been a source for present-day Swedish singers and bands too, so the occasional familiar tune may strike the ear, but there’s no keeping a good song down in folk music.
      Sometimes a promising new live band disappoints on CD. Not so here, with excellent, airy production by the band and Vincent Högberg, and Gjallarhorn’s treatments are fresh, exciting, beautiful and memorable. Big success predicted, particularly among an audience new to Swedish music.


© 1998 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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