Sophie Parkes penned this review.
Stemmenes Skygge, (“Shadow of Voices”), was initially conceived as a project for Norway’s most prolific jazz festival in Molde, a project which would join the Nordic countries in their Nordic medieval ballad tradition. Bråten Berg is the foremost figure of traditional music in Norway, having won many prizes and released many recordings to demonstrate. Her fifteen year friendship with Lena Willemark, Sweden’s ‘leading interpreter’ of traditional folk music and graduate of the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, has led to many collaborations and explorations of Nordic traditional music. Mazur, composer and regular member of the Jan Gabarek Group, adds her own distinct percussion style to the album.
‘Agnus Dei’, the second track on the album, is very much the medieval madrigal we would expect from the title, and is a clever choice of second track as it entices the listener in whilst gradually building up the musical texture. It is a minimalist piece, in that the pauses, silence, reverberation and echo are used to create maximum effect, but the powerful vocals and carefully chosen dynamics make it anything but demure. The musicians are certainly aware of the sounds they can create, and counterpart harmonies are used expertly.
And then the real fun begins. At nearly eleven minutes long, ‘Rike Mannens Själ’ is a demonstration of Mazur’s percussion expertise, where anything and everything is hit, rattled and shaken. Most curious is the boinging sound, the only term in which it can be defined, which I have been told is most likely to be the flexitone, a piece of metal which is bent and then hit by a pair of beaters. A drone is held by lower strings, and with the rapture of haphazard percussion over the top, a shadowy Nordic landscape is invoked where its contents are only stirred by the wind. Surprising tribal climaxes remind the listener of pagan rituals, until it is broken off and we are told to retreat once more into the shadows.
Percussion-orientated pieces such as this, of which John Cage would be proud, make up the majority of the remainder of the album. However, ‘Ljom’, the sixth track in, cannot go without a comment. A traditional Nordic herding song, it comprises the highest pitched frantic vocals I have ever heard, of which I can only draw the comparison to, with absolutely no disrespect meant to the musicians, a smurf chattering after an enormity of psychedelic substances. The cough-like barking that follows can only confirm the illusion, and makes the track an interesting but difficult listen.
In fact, it would be fair to conclude that this entire album is far from an easy listen. But, meant as a performance piece, it probably was not conceived in order to join the listeners together under a banner of lighter waving and ecstatic singing. On stage, though, I should imagine Stemmenes Skygge is a wonder to behold, especially from such authoritative figures in traditional music.
(Grappa Musikkforlag as, 2005)
