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Written in Folk Roots issue 157, 1996

UTLA
Brodd
NOR-CD 9514 (1995)

VIDAR LANDE
Norway - Fiddle Music From Agder
Auvidis/UNESCO D 8063 (1996)

KNUT BUEN
As Quick As Fire
Henry Street/Rounder HSR 0002 (1996)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Fanitullen 1 - 2
Grappa GRCD 4098 (1996)

Recorded virtually live in the studio with only a couple of overdubs, Utla makes ground-breaking music, remarkable generally for its natural and powerful linking of deep roots to what might be viewed as avant-garde music, cutting loose from the tyranny of chords using two melody instruments - Håkon Høgemo’s hardingfele and Karl Seglem’s sax or bukkehorn - with Terje Isungset’s mighty, innovative percussion, and also because here, playing through an often heavily overdriven Marshall stack, is not just any fiddler but the one who recently won the Landskappleik, the very specifically traditional national hardanger fiddle competition.
      All the basic melodies are traditional, largely hallings and springars, with two appearances of the rull Grautatvåro, and though none of the traditional rammeslag tunes appear here, the whole thing has the primal, extreme feel of those intense, hypnotic tunes in gorrlaus tuning.
      It’s uncompromising music, and it seems they’ve been equally uncompromising in recording it. While earlier albums such as Utla, Juv and Rit involving the trio before they took a band name are, like so many Norwegian releases, appealingly luxurious, indeed beautiful (but not sugary) in sound, enticing the listener into the ideas they contain, this album for the most part bucks the trend in that, except on guest Berit Opheim’s voice, there’s virtually no reverb. It’s true that it’s possible to make any old rubbish sound like it means something, and make a hi-fi sound expensive, if you keep it sparse and bathe it in crystalline reverb, so in principle I guess the new approach could be admirable - the music wouldn’t blend with the curtains but jump out of the speakers and misbehave on your carpet - but that isn’t quite what happens; a band gig happens in a space bigger than your living room; here, particularly when the hardingfele goes overdriven, what is overwhelming and wild live tends here to sound thick and oppressive, with quite a narrow stereo spread, like a feed from a live desk taken before the reverb sends. It’s a bold statement, and played loud it’s frightening, but at most people’s normal CD-listening volume it perversely sounds a bit small, and captures the notes but not the full splendour of the band live.

      Most solo hardingfele recordings are made in the natural acoustic of a village- or concert-hall, often with the player’s heartbeat-like double foot-stamp, and that’s the sound of Vidar Lande’s album of music from Norway’s southernmost region, Agder, in which he concentrates particularly on the tradition of Bygland, at the southern end of Setesdal. As well as hardingfele he plays normal fiddle (modified by having its neck shortened, which brings it closer to the design of a hardingfele), and he’s one of the players who has taken up the re-introduced Setesdals-fele, which has a normal fiddle body but with sympathetic strings like a hardingfele. He ends with the three famous rammeslag tunes played in gorrlaus tuning (the bottom string tuned right down to F), which in the hands of several famous fiddlers in the past seem to have been so hypnotic in their power that the player, resorting to the rammeslag gangar as a result of extreme anger, alcohol or both, could only be stopped by physical force.

      A right turn at the top of Setesdal takes you to the land of Knut Buen’s tradition. He and his elder brother Hauk have made many recordings (including the 1983 Ringing Strings collaboration on Topic with Vidar Lande and Shetland’s Tom Anderson and the very young Catriona Macdonald and Debbie Scott), but largely for his own Buen Kulturverkstad label. As Quick As Fire is a selection for a US label drawn from his recordings, largely solo but also with Kåre Nordstoga on church organ or classical guitarist Erik Stenstadvold, and including tunes such as Førnesbrunen and Fanitullen, widely-played but speaking differently in different hands.

      Fanitullen is also the title of the 1993 book on Norwegian and Sami folk music, edited by Bjørn Aksdal and Sven Nyhus, whose delayed companion double CD has just appeared. Disc 1 largely comprises solos on hardingfele, fiddle and a range of other traditional instruments, two fiddle duets, one quartet, and solo songs to show the various types, including stev, ballad, religious song, lullaby, cow-call and tralling, from various players and singers recorded between 1935 and 1992. Disc 2, using speech and musical demonstration, deals with the technique of eight instruments, and goes on to cover aspects of fiddle and hardingfele technique and show different types of ensemble. Its examples of “fusion” are limited to part of a 1975 track from folk-rock band Folque and a snatch of a 1985 Tiriltunga acapella vocal, so it doesn’t exactly bring things up to date. All speech and booklet notes are, like the book, in Norwegian, but if you’re delving deeper into Norwegian music you probably speak or are learning the language too; this might be seen as a sort of musical Linguaphone course.


© 1996 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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