|
Reader Info
|
Entries associated with the tag "Frode Haltli":May 16th - 2:03 a.m.
Although she's best known as a Norwegian folksinger, Unni Løvlid refuses to play to type. Her excellent trio Rusk, with fiddler Vegar Vårdal and accordionist Frode Haltli, has made two albums of more or less traditional music, but I first heard her when she released her 2005 solo album Vita (Heilo), an a cappella recording made inside the Emanuel Vigeland mausoleum on which she artfully employs the eerie acoustics of the space to swathe her ethereal voice in thick, milky reverb. Despite Løvlid's penchant for experimentation, I was surprised by her new solo album, Rite (Grappa), where her original tunes are layered in appealing electronics and subtle orchestrations, creating a sound somewhere between Norwegian folk and hypnotic pop. Among those enlisted to play on the album were Haltli (who's also a serious composer and experimenter), saxophonist Håkon Kornstad (Wibutee), French horn player and noisician Hild Sofie Tafjord (Fe-Mail, Spunk), and electronic soundscaper Helge Sten (Supersilent). This sort of stylistic duality seems widespread in Norway, and I don't think the small size of the country's population can explain it away--these folks have open ears. Løvlid's tender voice is the focal point, but the ingenious and richly varied arrangements help conjure a wide array of moods. The densely braided long tones on cello, accordion, and French horn in "Her Møter Eg Deg" remind me of a beatless Radiohead, but the vocals have such gossamer elegance and depth--Løvlid multitracks several contrapuntal parts--that the end result doesn't sound like anything else out there. Even the textures and ambiences inherent to Norwegian folk styles seem slippery in this context--you can hear them in there, but they don't make the total package any easier to figure out. Rite is a stunning piece of work, and it makes me anticipate Løvlid's next album even more. Today's playlist: Seichi Yamamoto, NOA 2 (Alchemy) November 12th - 3:22 p.m.
I just finished an extended weekend bookended by two radically different kinds of performances on the accordion. A few days ago I was in New Braunfels, Texas, where I spent a long evening at the town’s social event of the year, Wurstfest, a kind of topsy-turvy Oktoberfest that emphasizes sausage rather than beer. (Although judging from the yahoos who showed off how much brew they'd consumed by locking the handles of the plastic souvenir pitchers into their front pockets, I can assure you that alcohol consumption is alive and well down there.) Most of the live entertainment—if you don’t count the soused regalers—consisted of groups using some kind of variation of that old German oompah beat. Headlining on the night I visited was the Jimmy Sturr Orchestra, the schmaltzy Texas polka band that has a veritable stranglehold on the Grammy for best polka album (Sturr has won the award 16 of the 22 times it's been given, including 10 of the last 12). Whereas midwestern polka opts for a tough, traditional sound, Sturr is pure showbiz corn. His electric keyboardist warmed the crowd up with some synth swells that suggested the Alan Parsons Project before morphing into “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Sturr clearly arrived at polka via Bobby Vinton, and after hearing the group slam through “Splish Splash,” it became clear that he spends far more time perfecting his plastic-looking do than working on an interesting repertoire. Sturr had some stiff competition in the coif category—one of his saxophonists sported a wig that looked like it had just been picked up in front of a door, and his violinist shaped his actual hair into a mullet par excellence. The members of the Frode Haltli Quartet, the Norwegian group that performed yesterday at the Chicago Cultural Center, lacked the kind of haircuts that are worth discussing and they didn’t play any Bobby Darin covers, either. But the group’s gorgeous, radical reimaginings of traditional Norwegian folk material produced some of the most beautiful and meditative music I’ve heard all year. The group focused on music from the recent Passing Images (ECM), but the tweaked lineup—with violinist and hardanger fiddle maestro Nils Okland replacing violist Garth Knox, and American jazz clarinetist Darryl Harper subbing for mercurial Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen—introduced lovely new sonorities and angles to the material. Today’s playlist: |
|
©1996-2008 Creative Loafing Media All Rights Reserved. We welcome your comments and suggestions.