Under the Spell of Violins
Zosha Warpeha, Andris A. Dahle, Nils Økland Band, Morgonrode, Austin Larkin
The Hardanger Fiddle Spreads Its Sound
Anyone who has followed my writing over the years probably knows that I’m an ardent fan of the Hardanger fiddle, the traditional Norwegian folk instrument that features four or five sympathetic resonating strings beneath the bridge. My introduction to the instrument came through the music of Nils Økland on a pair of stunning albums made for Rune Grammofon early in the current century. That initial exposure focused mostly on the sound of the instrument, where overtones haunted the lines Økland articulated with his bow. He was rooted in the instrument’s rich folk practice, but over time he pushed against those boundaries, and Økland has since become just as invested in composing, arranging, and bandleading as he is extending the Hardanger’s possibilities. Experiencing his music led me further afield, and I struck gold with a series of archival albums culled from the vaults of Norway’s public radio network, NRK, that were issued by the Ta:lik label. I eagerly gobbled those up, while seeking out current practitioners. There was no shortage of great traditional players, but over time there’s been an increasing number of Hardanger players following Økland in their own fashion, such as Erland Apseneth and Benedicte Maurseth. I still adore the instrument’s sound, but a handful of recent albums capture the Hardanger in wildly different contexts, loaded with exciting potential.
Ta:lik’s archival output has slowed in recent years, but earlier this spring they issued Heima og austa åsen, a wonderful collection of solo music by Andris A. Dahle, a fiddler from Valdres who was fully immersed in and devoted to tradition. Before his death in 1995 he made a couple of albums, but when this practice runs in your blood, part of a community endeavor rather than a professional vocation, counting releases makes little sense. Most of the 22 tracks were recorded back in 1977, with a few more taped in 1990. The informative liner note essay by Niels Leine, a younger admirer of Dahle, illustrates his history as well as quirkiness:
Andris had his own technique that many would say was wrong. He normally held the fiddle to his chest, and the bow didn’t always go straight over the strings, the way the young players learn to play nowadays. But it suited him and the music he played well. When he was at his best, the sound that came from his fiddle was a sound that no-one else could imitate, a sound that caused the listener to forget time and space.
The slashing lines, usually designed for dancing, never cease to amaze me, but it’s the viscous harmonic haze that swells around every note that perpetually gets me. There are so many elusive sounds that a string instrument can produce that it sometimes feels like two or three players. If you listen carefully to “Kjørstaddrepen, springer,” there’s a persistent tone that emerges, almost like a muted struck bell, that halos Dahle’s fiddling, and it’s just one component within a rainbow of harmonic elements that become addictive when listening to this stuff.
Since it all started with Økland for me, it makes sense to include Gjenskinn (Hubro), the recent album from his ongoing quintet with bassist Mats Eilertsen, percussionist Håkon Mørch Stene, harmonium and Fender Rhodes player Sigbjørn Apeland, and saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrom, all musicians working in disparate backgrounds, whether folk, jazz, or contemporary music. Over the years Økland has included other string instruments in his arsenal, including the conventional violin and viola d'amore, and his aesthetic has continued to expand. The new album includes a piece called “Kairo,” whose primary theme was learned from Ahmed El Arnab, an Egyptian master of the kawala, an end-blown cane flute akin to the Turkish ney, and while the fiddler conveys the microtonal flurries and smeared melodies of Arabic music, the band remains true to its own aesthetic sensibilities, with a magically churning rhythmic attack and a slowly building intensity that finally disperses into the ether. “Tilley Plump” is an old Norwegian fiddle tune, but Økland learned it from Scottish fiddler Lell Robertson, and for this treatment the sawing string lines emit a folksy clarity before being subsumed by Stene’s thunderous clouds of percussion.
While the new album is certainly related to folk music, Økland is more interested in producing varied ensemble music not beholden to any single tradition or approach. One can hear traces of the old Nordic tone made famous by saxophonist Jan Garbarek here and there, especially on “Framover,” where Nystrom’s aerated tone harkens back to that drifty, meditative sound, albeit spiked here with some harmonic edge. “Morgenkvist” opens with a beautifully shimmery quilt of sound—undulating vibraphone textures, harmonium swells, deep woody bass tones, and tightly coiled fiddle and baritone saxophone patterns—before finally blossoming into a melancholy ballad strewn with fleeting coloristic blurts all underlining the leader’s ravishing solo. That piece is followed by “Kraft,” a bruising tone poem bristling with ominous portent that ends neatly, leaving tension hanging in the air. There are plenty of moments when the gorgeous grain of the Hardanger is palpable as on the opening part of the title track, which ripples with ghostly friction and tongue slapping pops by Nystrom. While the band isn’t about Hardanger per se, its presence has a lot to do with the group’s lush, enveloping sound. Below you can check out the opening piece, “Minimalvals,” a tune built from the structure of a song Økland’s been playing for forty years, but gutted of its original melody in favor of pure, stripped-down aura.
I’m not the only person who became enamored with the Hardanger sound through the music of Økland. After hearing her astonishing solo debut silver dawn (Relative Pitch) I assumed that Zosha Warpeha had grown up with the music in her native Minnesota, but she also credits Økland with introducing the instrument to her. Warpeha actually plays a Hardanger d’amore, a close relative. She is part of the larger improvising community in New York these days, and elsewhere she works regularly with the likes of percussionist Carlo Costa, guitarist and instrument builder Webb Crawford, and saxophonist Michael Foster, but I love how her approach isn’t bound by any specific tradition. That’s not to say she’s disrespectful. Warpeha spent two years studying at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo on a Fullbright, and there’s no missing her devotion to the tradition. Her album mixes original compositions with improvised material, and while it’s hard to tell the two apart it certainly doesn’t matter much in the end. Despite her traditional rigor, Warpeha seems able to push the instrument in new directions in a way that someone who grew up without feeling traditional weight of the instrument’s legacy can’t.
While Warpeha certainly isn’t the first Hardanger player to tackle other aesthetic worlds with the instrument—Økland is a pioneer in that sense—I’ve yet to hear anyone else dig into such abstract realms, straddling a line between pure improvisation and contemporary music, but it really seems like what guides her is sound for its own sake. In the opening piece, a levitational number titled “wakerobin,” her bowing unleashes all kinds of overtones, and her double stops seem to float rather than push forward. Her sound is flush with traditional techniques, but the shape of each piece follows a more idiosyncratic design that blends meditation with exploration. Her bow dances and bounces across the strings on a piece like “hunter’s moon,” which transforms the overtones into spiky, almost percussive sound daubs. In “on the mountain ash” she unleashes brittle pizzicato tones over a lush, ebb-and-falling drone, and complementary vocal lines. The light bow strokes she uses at the start of “when I am real,” are so deliciously aerated that they almost seem electronically manipulated, but it’s all about bow pressure. She shadows her frictive lines with gentle, wordless singing, as if fully immersed in a trance. Check it out below. Warpeha is able to draw upon a variety of sources, but their application never sounds transparent because her own aesthetic preferences and experiences reshape even the most traditional tactics into something all her own. In that way, Warpeha honors musicians like Økland or the great Czech violinist Iva Bittova, in subverting tradition not as a political act, but as a point of departure. Considering the instrument’s tonal brilliance it’s kind of amazing that more intrepid sonic explorers haven’t tapped its potential—although the expense of these gorgeous handmade instruments might have something to do with it. I can’t wait to hear what she does with the instrument in less specific group settings, but few recordings I’ve heard this year have proven so beautiful, varied, and emotionally potent.
Last but not least, I’d like to draw attention to the new album from Morgonrode, a group that’s been around for quite a few years. I only recently discovered the quintet, which includes the wonderful Hardanger fiddler Helga Myhr, who released
Natten veller seg ut, a phenomenal solo album, for the Motvind label in 2019, followed in 2022 by Andsyning, an even stronger ensemble project with singer Malin Alander, double bassist Adrian Fiskum Myhr, multi-instrumentalist Rasmus Kjorstad, and percussionist Michaela Antalová. Like Økland and Warpeha, she thrives in various settings, and that’s how I stumbled upon Morgonrode. The band’s third album III (Ta:lik) is nominally a folk-rock album, and like the Økland record mentioned above, the music isn’t necessarily concerned with the sound of the Hardanger, although it can’t help but assert its presence. In fact, fellow member Selma French Bolstad doubles on Hardanger and the Swedish nyckelharpa, and Kjorstad is on violin, yet despite the ubiquity of these deeply resonant instruments the group’s sound is primarily song-driven. The group, which also includes percussionist Andreas Skår Winther and double bassist Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson (who plays in the superb improvising trio Moskus), creates a hypnotic yet catchy sound built around the gorgeous vocal harmonies of Myrh and Bolstad. The tunes across the record cover loads of terrain, and after going back to the quintet’s previous records, it’s clear that they are increasingly forging their own aesthetic, one that’s less explicitly built upon Norwegian folk traditions. Below you can check out one of my favorite songs from the record, “Den som går ut.”
More Strings—Austin Larkin’s Sound World
There are certainly some harmonic similarities between some of this Hardanger music and the work of New Haven, Connecticut violinist Austin Larkin, who performs at KM28 on Tuesday, May 21, sharing the bill with the excellent Berlin-based pianist Quentin Tolimieri. He’s a fierce sonic explorer, with a deep devotion to sustained sound and psychoacoustic phenomena. In recent years he’s gained some notice thanks to his close connection to Tongue Depressor, including a couple of collaborative efforts like the recent Landau Bar (Redscroll), but on this visit he’ll be focusing on the material from his 2022 album Violin Liquid Phases, which eschews the drones favored by TD. Still, his music is similarly minimal, with each of the eight extended pieces focusing on a particular facet of violin playing, digging into different bowing techniques, the harmonic action of tight intervals, and slow-moving changes.
At first glance it might not seem as though Larkin is doing much, and his playing isn’t concerned with the crucial exactitude required by tuning-based explorations, but once the listener settles in and gets used to his soundworld, things open in fascinating ways. As you can hear on “III,” below, his bowing generates a glinting terrain of lapidary detail. Each bow stroke unleashes sound akin to a meticulously cut gemstone, radiantly sparkling according to where and how the arco action occurs. Patterns change slowly, often sneaking up on the listener after they’ve already shifted, with back-and-forth movement producing a kind of internal dialogue. The tonal qualities of each stroke also change incrementally, and sometimes the rounded sound, swelling and receding, sounds electronic. As much as I dig the album, I can’t wait to hear the sounds made live, filling the room.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
May 21: Austin Larkin, violin; Quentin Tolimieri, piano, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 22: Erika de Casier; Kiss Facility, 8 PM, Hole⁴⁴, Hermannstraße 146,
12051 Berlin
May 22: Chris Abrahams, piano; the Still (Chris Abrahams, piano, Rico Lee, electric guitar, Derek Shirley, double bass, and Steve Heather, drums), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 23: Labile Lahar (Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Jukka Kääriäinen, guitar, and Joonas Leppänen, drums), 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
May 23: Amund Stenøien Quartet and Michäel Attias (Amund Stenøien, vibraphone, Joakim Rainer, piano, Steinar Heide Bø, drums, Gard Kronborg, acoustic bass, and Michäel Attias, alto saxophone), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
May 23: Fred Frith, guitar, voice, Mariá Portugal, drums, percussion, voice, and gabby fluke-mogul, violin, voice, 8 PM, Exploratorium, Zossener Strasse 24, 10961, Berlin
May 24: Han Bennink, drums, Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone & clarinet, Declan Forde, piano, and James Banner, double bass, 9 PM, Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117, 10115 Berlin
May 25: Zinc and Copper, Svarte Greiner, Eleni Poulou, 8 PM, Jugend[widerstands]museum Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9/10, 10247 Berlin
May 25: Ned Collette, guitar and voice, with Chris Abrahams, piano, Judith Hamann, cello and organ, Fredrik Kinbom, bass, and Steve Heather, drums and percussion, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 25: Dan Peter Sundland’s Idea of a Good Time (Michaël Attias,alto saxophone, Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Johannes Schleiermacher, baritone & tenor saxophones, Dan Peter Sundland, electric bass, and Moritz Baumgärtner, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 25: Dungeon Acid; Evol; Mark Fell; Wilted Woman, 9 PM, Roter Salon, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 10178 Berlin
May 27: Jorge Drexler, 8 PM, Theater des Westens, Kantstraße 12, 10623 Berlin