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Written in Folk Roots issue 162, 1996

SULESKÆR
Over Havet
Tutl SHD 19 (1996)

Any CD featuring any musicians from the Faroes is notable even if only in terms of rarity. Suleskær’s second album, whose title means “Over The Sea”, is a cut above that.
      Judging from the sleeve notes, the band seems to move mostly between the Faroes, Orkney, Denmark and New England. It comprises two Danish fiddlers - Jørn Jensen and Erling Olsen, Danish accordionist and sax-player Eskil Romme, and Faroese Ívar Bærentsen (guitar, mandolin and occasional vocals) with guest Faroese fiddler Niels Bo Vogensen on some tracks. Bærentsen isn’t perhaps the world’s greatest singer, but the playing has a light, relaxed melodic Scottish/American kind of swing, and the new tunes hold up well with the traditional.
      Drawing mainly on band members’ compositions and the tradition of Denmark (under whose the crown the self-governing Faroes come), with occasional Scottish, Shetland, Swedish, Norwegian and American tunes, it doesn’t mark an explosion of Faroese music, and the band makes no claims in that direction, describing what it does as “traditional music from the North Atlantic countries” - but the current growth of interest in Danish traditional music didn’t look likely a while back, and this is another step in that and also perhaps a harbinger of more from the outpost of Norden 300 Km north of Cape Wrath.


© 1996 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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