- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in Folk Roots issue 174, 1997

FARMERS MARKET
Musikk Fra Hybridene
Kirkelig Kulturverksted FXCD 182

There’s a little known land called Hybridene whose magpie-like musical culture draws on all around it, not in the old way of slow assimilation and blending but in the new zap-culture way of flipping from one to another after a few seconds.
      Norway’s speed-Balkan-boogie band Farmers Market is the leading - well, actually the only - exponent of this music of a poor but happy people whose post-agricultural days are spent listening to too many world music samplers, watching too much TV, listening undiscriminatingly to too much western and eastern European and American radio over the past few decades, and drinking far too much coffee.
      It has the jittery, chopped-up time-flow sort of effect that leads some people to lay off the marijuana/speed flavoured vodka margaritas, and goes on for the whole album of titles such as How High The Loch (Ornamentology), Teknopolsanitza, Neli In The Sky With Farmers, and I Took Up The Prunes (a titular nod to Jan Garbarek, that one).
      Four of the band are Norwegian, one Bulgarian, with guest authentic Mystère des Voix B vocals from Neli Atanassova and Sorina Bogomilova, Mireille Roth’s sultry French on Siste Tango I Paradis, and magnificent kaval from Borislav Zgourovski and gadulka from Georgi Andreev.
      At worst, this is brilliantly played and arranged, novelty-number pastiche medley-making, but the lightning switches aren’t just of tune but of instrumental sound and whole spot-on arrangement, bringing moments of total immersion in a style. There are frustrating snatches of pure melodic beauty likely to inspire you to search - immediately - for a long-unplayed album, and occasionally, as in clarinet/saxist Trifon Trifonov’s Power Ballad a theme carries through longer than a couple of bars, in this case a whole track, which then segues into Nils Olav Johansen’s joik vocalising in Kind Of Blues, followed by a burst of smooth Shadow of your Smile vocals in Aaron Neville territory before snapping back into Balkan boogie with overlaid hyper-joik.
      Its intercultural junctions can be more in the nature of edits than blends, and it can be - is - unsettling and give-us-a-break irritating, but it periodically hits the spot; at its best there’s a Zappa-ish knowingness, and it’s never less than remarkable in its playing and understanding of the musical styles which go to make up the music of the almost-invisible islands (between Denmark and Sweden, just off the new coast of Bulgaria) to which ethnomusicologists and WOMEX delegates are flocking: Hybridene (Capital: Gsvensk. Language: Esperamomento).


© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw



You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -