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Written in Folk Roots issue 155, 1996

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Lockrop & Vallåtar - Ancient Swedish pastoral music
Caprice CAP 21483 (1995)

Silence, but for water lapping gently. Suddenly from the hills a woman’s voice, powerful, high, wordless, more like controlled screaming than what our culture regards as singing, resounds across the darkening lake; then from another part of the shore another, and a third from further away, the echoes layering like a chord. Silence reasserts, broken by the vocal sound of a cow-horn, and soon three horns are calling and re-echoing from around Stångtjärn.
      The track continues for nearly half an hour, a hugely atmospheric, classic piece of field recording from a raft moored on the small lake near Falun, the calm lake, the hills and the evening inversion layer making an echo chamber with very long, smooth reverberation; the notes seem even to grow and swell before they decay.
      Falun Folk Festival annually features just such a Stångtjärn concert of the high-pitched animal-calling by women (kulning) - focusing intense energy into the higher vocal frequencies for maximum carrying ability (and sometimes perhaps also, traditionally, a socially acceptable opportunity for emotional self-expression, alone in the hills) - other herding-calls (lockrop), and herders’ horn music. The recording was made a couple of days before the 1995 festival.
      Lockrop & Vallåtar is devoted to pastoral solo music - women’s calling, birchbark trumpet (näverlur), cow and goat-horn trumpets, wooden whistle (spilåpipa) and willow overtone-flute (sälgflöjt).
      The first recordings for Swedish Radio of this kind of material were made by Matts Arnberg in 1948. He realised that he wasn’t going to get people to deliver this music in a studio, so, nearly 50 years before ISDN audio-linking, he positioned three singers in a grove of trees in Rättvik, hooked up a mic via the telephone lines direct to a shellac master recorder in Stockholm, and co-ordinated the singing to coincide with the 4-minute recording capability of the disc 300 kilometres away. The results, tracks 1-3 on this CD, are remarkably good and un-telephonic.
      The other 33 tracks here run from 40s to the lake event in 1995.
      So the 25-CD Caprice/P2 Musica Sveciae series rolls on, bringing in its first releases a traditional music overview album, jazz/folk music fusions (both reviewed in FR), tunes from Orsa and Ålvdalen, rhymes and lullabies, harmonica and accordion music, a double CD on the medieval ballad, and now this, whose last track in particular will turn the ears of many who’d never have contemplated buying any sort of folk music album.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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