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Written in fRoots issue 273, 2006


TAITH
Now & Then - Old and New Music from Wales and Finland
Taith TRCD 001 (2005)

Welsh guitarist meets Finnish kantele player on arts-funded multi-tradition tour, they bring in a crwth and viol player and make an album. It could be one of those cross-cultural projects that ticks boxes on a funding application and emerges more worthy in concept than interesting in outcome.
      But Now & Then bears no sponsorship or funding logos; Dylan Fowler and Timo Väänänen, with crwth and viols player Gillian Stevens, recorded and released it on Fowler’s own label out of musical fascination and a belief in the possibilities that proves well-founded.
      The album’s strength is that while it contains a good deal of improvisation it’s firmly built on actual tunes, most of them traditional, from the experience of each player: from Welsh end a crwth-led Welsh pibcorn tune, a 9/8 jig and a song melody, from Finland a song melody, a polska, and an Ingrian shepherds’ tune using both crwth and its Finnish bowed-lyre counterpart, jouhikko.
      All three are restrained players, listening rather than fighting for space. The sound is open and largely reflective, the continuous notes of the bowed strings sewing threads through the pattering and chiming of the kantele and guitar, with occasional colouring touches of vocal and oboe
      The new tunes include a rippling Fowler-Väänänen co-composition that applies the form of kantele church-bell pieces to the watermill and bells of Abergavenny, and a Fowler piece inspired by Finnish hymns and the kantele. Fowler’s work with Szapora results in a tune that, because of the compulsiveness of 7/8, does evolve into an Indo-Balkan jam but injects a burst of drive at the right point in the album. Stevens’ Conductus is an exploration of 9/8 in which the airy reediness of Fowler’s oboe weaves among overlapping repeated patterns, and the only well-known tune here, the Scots song tune The Selchie (here as Sylkie), forms a quiet coda.
      www.taithrecords.co.uk


© 2006 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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