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Written in Folk Roots issue 169, 1997

HEDNINGARNA
Hippjokk
Silence SRSCDD 4737 (1997)

JP NYSTRÖMS
Stockholm 1313 Km
Resource RESCD 514 (1996)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Xourcism! - Xourcise Your Mind 2
Xource XOUCD 115 (1997)

An interim sort of Hedningarna album, made by the band’s Swedish core line-up, the one that made the first album - Anders Stake, Hållbus Totte Mattsson and Björn Tollin - and featuring Sámi joiker Wimme Saari on three tracks, and instrumental guests including Norwegian guitarist Knut Reiersrud and fiddler Ola Bäckström, but without the Finnish singers. They haven’t left, though; Sanna Kurki-Suonio and Anita Lehtola (who has replaced Tellu Virkkala) are very much part of the current full band.
      There’s a good deal of interesting stuff here, and Wimme’s contributions, joiking the bear and the wolf, were well worth capturing, but after the glories of Kaksi! and Trä, both the results of very long intense studio work and hard acts to follow, this, while certainly worth having, misses the vocal and songwriting contribution of the women and feels more like a set of ideas and textures on the way to the next album rather than a satisfyingly complete one in its own right. Nevertheless, one of Europe’s great noises.

      JP Nyströms, named after a harmonium manufacturer, is a five-piece, or sometimes six-piece, band from Norrbotten, the part of Sweden nearest the top of the Gulf of Bothnia. That’s just across from Finland’s Ostrobothnia, and much of the music on Stockholm 1313 Km (compiled from four LPs released between 1979 and 1987) fits right into, or at least right next to, the Ostrobothnian dance-music fiddling tradition both in form - waltz, polka, polska, mazurka, kadrilj, hambo - and in instrumental sound - though they occasionally use guitar, recorder, accordion or bass it’s predominantly three or four fiddles and harmonium, and a light, smooth playing style with a hint of mournfulness. Even the periodic bursting into song, in both Swedish and Finnish, is in the sort of comic narrative style that Swedish and Finnish emigrants took with them to the American mid-west - Tre Bröder could almost be Risto Hotakainen singing, and when Kadrilj Från Haparanda follows it the mind drifts to Kaustinen and the Perho river valley...

The foregoing albums contribute a track each to Xourcism!, the latest sampler from Silence/Xource/Resource (all part of the MNW Records Group), which features material from many Swedish leading progressive roots releases including those by Hoven Droven, Garmarna and Väsen.


© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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