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Written in fRoots issue 209, 2000
 

LENA WILLEMARK
Windogur
Amigo AMCD 742 (2000)

In FR 196’s Frifot feature Lena Willemark mentioned a forthcoming album of her own songs, and here it is.
      No neat singer-songwriterism this; it’s a big, wild, deep strong work befitting one of Europe’s most rivetingly distinctive vocalists. Drawing together the strands of her personal musical background, from the traditions of Dalarna to Swedish jazz and Indian scales and rhythms, she keens, whispers, cattle-calls, yells, in company with pianist Bobo Stenson, bassist Palle Danielsson and percussionist Lisbeth Diers, and blends her driving, soaring fiddle with a string trio of Staffan Larson, Mats Olofsson and Väsen’s Mikael Marin.
      A huge amount of the content here is in the lyrics and the resonances of their images; since they’re in Dalarna dialect they’re unusual-sounding even to a Swedish speaker, and without command of that language one’s left with just the sound of this intense, spacious music of winding melodies, subtle harmonisations and wide dynamics, in which grainy edginess of voice and horsehair cuts vivid contrasts with liquid jazzy piano and wood-toned double bass. It’s not immediate-access, but even without lyric comprehension it’s exciting, liberating stuff, and another major step in the evolution of new northern musics which draw on the wellsprings of tradition, jazz and all the other potential influences on a present-day Nordic musician but aren’t bound by the structures of any of them.


© 2000 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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