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Written in fRoots issue 209, 2000
 

TOXA
Toxa
Drone DROCD 021 (2000)

RANARIM
Till Ljusan Dag
Drone DROCD 019 (2000)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Kurbits - Folkmusik från Dalarna Vol.1
Drone DROCD 018 (1999)

KALLE ALMLÖF & ANDERS ALMLÖF
Malungslek
Giga GCD-46 (2000)

The elegant, communicative directness and completeness of Toxa’s music bucked the predictions and won this year’s Kaustinen international competition, the Swedish trio seeming to hit a “just-right” condition in its performances. The CD was recorded some time earlier, but the essence is there: strong, rhythmically subtle traditional and new-made tunes with Olof Misgeld and Marie Axelsson’s twin fiddles, Olle Lindvall’s interweaving gutty guitar lines or breathy wooden whistles, and Axelsson’s animated traditional singing.

      Two years earlier the competition was won by another Swedish band, Kalabra, featuring Ulrika Bodén. In the quartet Ranarim she and fellow Rosenbergs Sjua singer Sofia Sandén duet in traditional ballads and songs, with Jens Engelbrecht’s guitar and mandola anchoring the rhythms and Niklas Roswall’s nyckelharpa bowing a third voice. Among rich ballad imagery pan-European traditional motifs abound: a gold ring identifies a sailor to his lover after seven years away, there’s a “Herring’s Head/Mallard” type of song about the uses for the parts of a crow, and one ballad that might ring bells with a Martin Carthy audience: a cruel mother-in-law’s spell binds Elin to seven years and forty weeks of pregnancy. No knots to undo in this version; she finds the place the spell doesn’t work, the bridal chest, gives birth there and the mother-in-law dies of rage.

      Sofia Sandén shows up again on Kurbits Vol.1, which showcases seven of the new generation of very able Dalarna traditional musicians. The other six are all fiddlers: Ida and Jenny Täpp, Zara and Mattias Helje, Anders Almlöf and Jonas Hjalmarsson, playing twenty-seven tracks together and solo, punctuated by four tracks from Sofia of unaccompanied songs and a ballad.

      Anders Almlöf is the nephew of leading Malung fiddler Kalle Almlöf, and on Malungslek the pair of them duet and solo sparklingly, on rich-sounding fiddles made by Kalle, in tunes found in the Malung area: polskas, several bridal marches, marching tunes, polses, a hambopolkett, a springlek and a waltz. As always with Giga releases, the humane, understatedly witty booklet notes speak in anecdotes of the ways in which tradition and personalities interact and evolve in Sweden’s wonderful fiddling world, a place of intense skill, craft and social interaction rather than showbiz.


© 2000 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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