This latest release from Hardanger fiddle player Nils Økland has been six years in the making as it was originally prepared for the Vossajazz 2016 event.
The interim period has found him compiling just the right selection of players to do the pieces commissioned for that event justice. His chosen instrument always evokes images of the wild Nordic landscape, with the spare arrangements allowing the listener to drift in their own reverie, the music transporting them to an unfamiliar and magical place.
The drifting cloudlike soundscape of opener “Blankt Vatn” feels like an introduction, an example of what the ensemble can accomplish, with crying tones lending in anguish; but there is also gentleness. Nils engenders an air of restraint where nothing overwhelms the natural inclination. Mats Eilertsen‘s bass tiptoes through frosty clearings, the gentle, relaxed tone allowing the group to apply a simple but effective repetition in the extensive “Rull” that is replete with little outbursts, snapshots of each instrument surfing on the tidal energy. The strings have such presence on “Linja” with Nils’s bandmates laying a basis for his movement; there is a classical feel to its textural build and in the way the sum of the parts leads to a lush whole, a one-note prepared piano seemingly leading the guiding rush. The sinuous, almost proggy bass line to “Glødetråd” gives a good indication of the other directions in which the group likes to head, and the surprise electric guitar and sax duet does lend a more progressive air, pushing the listener out of their reverie, while the harmonium of “Vals” has an older, more lugubrious feel like some Venetian quartet.Brother Torbjørn‘s trumpet in “Glør”‘ joins hands with the roll and peal of Sigbjørn Apeland‘s piano and lends further fresh variety, and you realise how much reliance there is on the guests to embellish the pieces. His selections have a real wisdom, and there is a caring and careful sense of musical community at play here with a surprising swell of drama.
I kept sensing hints of the kind of lachrymose melancholy that occurs in some Gaelic folk music; a kind of pining for something, but it is a sound that is generated by people in a sparsely populated land. The solitary drum and ragged chorus of penultimate track “Sjanti” in a way defines that sensibility before the album bows out with the subtle “Tråd”.This gathering of sensitive Nordic players bears great fruit with Nils’s compositions and delivers a series of dramatic snapshots of their native land in all its glory.
-Mr Olivetti-
