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Written in fRoots issue 377, Nov 2014


MARA ARANDA & SOLATGE
Lo Testament
Bureo BM007 (2013)

L’HAM DE FOC
Cançó De Dona i Home
Galileo GMC055 (2013)

Mara Aranda was the singer with Valencia band L’Ham De Foc, and with the other members of Solatge she continues to draw on Mediterranean music with instrumentation from various traditions and some of the arranging approach of a meaty version of early music.
     Here there’s a more explicit focus on traditional music from Valencia and nearby than there was in L’Ham De Foc. The melodies are a strong combination of tradition and the work of the band’s widely multi-instrumental Eduard Navarro, the tradition-shaped lyrics largely her own.
     Her singing is characteristically Iberian, warmly open-throated and curling around the notes in quick melismatic turns. It floats above dense, grainy acoustic-instrumental textures of Navarro’s Catalan and Bulgarian bagpipes, dolçaina, tarota, gralla and other spirit-raisingly strident Valencian and Catalan reeds, fiddle, laud and moraharpa, with Josep-Maria Ribelles’s harp, Jota Martínez’s bouzouki, hurdy-gurdy and fretted instruments, Abel Garcia’s hurdy-gurdy, laouto and baglama, and frame-drums and other hand-percussion by all.

     As it happens, German label Galileo has recently re-issued L’Ham De Foc’s fine 2002 penultimate album, originally released by Spain’s Sonifolk. Its range of material sources is wider, including from the Balkans and the Sephardic repertoire, and there’s a touch more use of the sound-crafting possibilities of the studio, but it matches up very well with Lo Testament, in feel and instrumentation led by multi-instrumentalist/producer/engineer Efrén López (who now plays with, among others, Ross Daly, and is soon to release his solo album) and also featuring Solatge’s Navarro.

     Both are distributed in the UK by www.discovery-records.com.


© 2014 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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