Folk Music

Elina Duni/Rob Luft: Lost Ships (ECM 2689)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni
Rob Luft
Lost Ships

Elina Duni voice
Rob Luft guitar
Fred Thomas piano, drums
Matthieu Michel flugelhorn
Recorded February 2020
Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Jean-Paul Dumas-Grillet
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 13, 2020

You’ll have to flee,
But you’ll carry
This relentless sea,
Echoing in you, for always.

With this lyric, Elina Duni and Rob Luft share the secret of their collaborative masterpiece, Lost Ships. Between themes of migration and ecological failure, interspersed with memories of times and places, the Albanian-Swiss singer and British guitarist turn the spirit of contradiction inside out over and over until the differences blur beyond recognition. The track yielding this poetic observation, an ode to the wind entitled “Brighton,” is a veritable curtain of sound billowing in breath. Before that, however, the Italian lullaby “Bella Ci Dormi” (Beauty, You Sleep) elicits the album’s first declaration. Whereas we might normally think of such singing as marking the closing of a day, this feels more like the opening of one. The pianism of British multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas and lilting guitar exude the same grammar. Other traditional gems, including the Albanian “Kur Më Del Në Derë” (When You Appear At Your Doorstep) and the American “The Wayfaring Stranger,” remind us that nothing has truly changed from when they were first unearthed.

“Flying Kites” is one of the many journeys herein penned by Duni and Luft and stands out for its instrumental unraveling, especially in the playing of Swiss flugelhornist Matthieu Michel, who completes the ensemble. Further originals include “Numb,” a timely plea for forgiveness, and the title song, a shapely construction that travels in curves even as it speaks straight to the heart. Another is “Empty Street,” a duet that turns ghosts into signposts for those living in the wake of their demise…

No matter what Duni touches, she turns into something far more precious than gold: time incarnate. A marvelous example is her rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “I’m A Fool To Want You.” As a lantern hanging from the outstretched hand of a dark past, it seeks redemption in an era that has forgotten its meaning. At Duni’s lips, the words remind us of just how sharp the edges of hope can be. And in making Charles Aznavour’s “Hier Encore” her own, to the sole accompaniment of an acoustic guitar, she helps us understand that nature stands in the way of love when our love of self stands in the way of nature.

Lost Ships carves a special line in ECM’s broad waters, and to its fleet I would add Amina Alaoui’s Arco Iris, Arianna Savall/Petter Udland Johansen’s Hirundo Maris, and Norma Winstone’s Somewhere Called Home for worthy company. As such comparisons should imply, it is more than a recording; it is a voyage, contrary to its title, of being found.

Sinikka Langeland: Wolf Rune (ECM 2674)

| Tyran Grillo

Sinikka Langeland
Wolf Rune

Sinikka Langeland kantele, vocal
Recorded December 2019 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Recording supervision: Sean Lewis
Engineer: Martin Abrahamsen
Cover photo: Christian Houge
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 9, 2021

My eye and God’s eye
is one eye,
and one sight,
and one knowledge,
and one love.
–Meister Eckhart

After a loosely bound series of five tablets, the most recent being 2015’s The Magical Forest, Sinikka Langeland chisels an authorial portrait of the highest order with her first solo album. With so many multicolored scenes in collaborative form behind her, the Norwegian singer and kantele storyteller offers this monochromatic wonder as an ode to becoming and dissolution.

For the opening “Moose Rune,” she attunes the acoustic signatures of Rainbow Studio through her 15-string kantele, playing it with a bow to bring every molecule into sacred order. So begins an extended prayer of which the 39-string sister instrument breathes like an elder of time perched on a stony crag to oversee the histories Langeland has been blessed to carry. Playing the traditional “Polsdance from Finnskogen,” she expands the sonority at hand with liquidity to spare. Such instrumentals carry themselves with a fleshly quality, leaving footprints in every patch of earth they traverse.

Two “Kantele Prayers” give solace. Played on a 5-string instrument, they are like a child cultivating a mature soul, waiting for the day when, as an adult, she can do the opposite. Thus do the strings resonate in “Winter Rune” with all the force of a life lived circularly—tender yet aware of the rigid climbs one must complete to survey paths of learning. Past traumas blush on the horizon, but the voice gives assurance that not a single drop of their storms will make itself known upon the skin of the here and now. And when Langeland’s bow opens its heart for the second time, she creates a portal of escape for anyone who wishes to follow.

While her heart pumps with the blood of tradition, as in the modest folk tune “The Girl In The Headlands” and the hymnal “I See Your Light,” it also chambers a deeply generative spirit. From the latter is birthed a handful of original melodies. Langeland composes with an ancient sensibility and gives a wealth of experience to every turn of phrase. In “Row My Ocean,” her setting of a text by poet and playwright Jon Fosse, she evokes the movement of oars more emotional than physical, extending every string as a current in its own right, while “The Eye Of The Blue Whale” curls its fingers around her own verses, describing a disembodied whale’s eye as a metaphor for songs that, once sung, belong only to themselves. Such observations take wing in “When I Was The Forest.” Every gesture encoded in these words after 13th-century philosopher Meister Eckhart contains sparkle and shadow in equal measure. At tip of finger and rim of lip, Langeland enacts wandering, supplication, and regard for the natural world in ways that blur the lines between flesh and fern.

The starlit melody of “Don’t Come To Me With The Entire Truth” practices what it espouses: a humbling exaltation of the drop before the ocean, content in knowing just enough to make every breath count. All that’s left to regard is the title track, a rendering of an old rune song in which the Trinity is loosed like a pack of light to roam the darkness of this world, devouring every demon in sight. The stepwise motions of the kantele here are beyond virtuosic: they are fully integrated into their environment.

This is the soul of the forest made clean, a hearth in which to hibernate until the clouds pass over us in search of dawn.

Maria Farantouri/Cihan Türkoğlu: Beyond The Borders (ECM 2585)

| Tyran Grillo

2585 X

Maria Farantouri
Cihan Türkoğlu
Beyond The Borders

Maria Farantouri voice
Cihan Türkoğlu saz, kopuz, voice
Anja Lechner violoncello
Meri Vardanyan kanon
Christos Barbas ney
İzzet Kızıl percussion
Recorded June 2017, Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Giorgos Karyotis
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 21, 2019

“Everything flows.
Out of one thing there comes unity,
and out of unity one thing.”
–Heraclitus

The project documented on Beyond The Borders was born when Greek singer Maria Farantouri first heard Cihan Türkoğlu, a saz virtuoso of Anatolian extraction who had been living in Athens for ten years. After proposing the idea to ECM, producer Manfred Eicher helped shape the program into its present form, debuting it as part of the 2017 Athens Festival. For this live performance, they are joined by Anja Lechner on cello, Meri Vardanyan on kanon, Christos Barbas on ney, and İzzet Kızıl on percussion. Their collective sound is distinctly individual, like a soul of many cities and eras compressed into the flesh of a single body.

Most of the songs are traditional treasures from the lands of Turkey, Armenia, Lebanon, and Greece. Each tells a story preserved by centuries of reiteration, and achieves relevance as a cool drink of water in today’s political firestorm. The scintillating arrangement of “Drama köprüsü” (The Bridge of Drama) finds both Türkoğlu and Farantouri singing the life of Hassan, a legendary Robin Hood-like figure who went rogue after slaying his superior, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor while shadowing the village just to glimpse the woman to whom he was once betrothed. The Sephardic ballad “Yo era ninya” (I Was a Girl) tells of a highborn maiden ruined by a deceitful man. A mournful quality made resolutely genuine by Farantouri’s delivery, as if sung through a cloud, makes this a standout among standouts. Lechner’s cello is remarkable, a red thread drawn through shadows of time.

From Armenia we receive “Kele kele” (Strolling), an anonymous song preserved by Komitas Vardapet around the turn of the 20th century. In it, a lovelorn girl sings: “I am dying for your footsteps, my precious.” An extended intro from Vardanyan paints a wide terrain on which to seek the traces of her loved one. Not all is so gloomy, however, as the Macedonian wedding song “Triantafylia” (Upon the Rosebush) works from a quiet introduction to an energy powerful enough to shine unscathed through a pessimistic future. “Wa Habibi” (My Beloved), a Christian hymn from Syria and Lebanon, unravels with a lifetime’s worth of experience in every throaty word.

The program is rounded out by songs written specially for Farantouri with music by Türkoğlu and words by Agathi Dimitrouka. “Dyo kosmoi mia angalia” (Embraced Worlds) takes Eros as its theme and evokes loving attributes via kanon, in which are felt reflections of sunlight upon a body of water whose surface is a portal between realms. “Ta panda rei” is a setting of Heraclitus, whose blurring of parts and wholes, of lives and life itself, yields percussive details from Kızıl and breaths from the ney of Barbas. Between “Lahtara gia zoi” (Yearning for Life), an empathic song for the uprooted, and “Anoihtos kaimos” (A Secret Yearning), a surreally uplifting dream, we feel the connective tissue of death and life as if it were the very substance of our hearts. With every beat, we get closer to this music, even as it follows its own path through the tragedies of our world.

Areni Agbabian: Bloom (ECM 2549)

| Tyran Grillo

2549 X

Areni Agbabian
Bloom

Areni Agbabian voice, piano
Nicolas Stocker percussion
Recorded October 2016, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 26, 2019

Patience is more important now…

Bloom marks the ECM debut of a God-given talent. Areni Agbabian, an Armenian American from Los Angeles, is far more than any biographical sketch might seek to define her, if only because her art points to at least two futures for every past in which it is tangled. As a singer, she is equal parts Meredith Monk and Kate Bush, and in that respect embodies the power of wordless improvisation to tell as much of a story as a crafted lyric. As a pianist, she treats keys as seeds and by her touch inspires them to sprout feathers in place of leaves. As a songwriter, she gathers all of these metaphors in a sacred circle, and by that act offers them as prayers to the forces flowing through her. For this album, she is joined by percussionist Nicolas Stocker, whose textural sensibilities open their arms to whatever impulses arise in the studio.

The album’s cycle of life begins in the fullness of adulthood with the bipartite “Patience.” Its combination of muted piano and brushed snare meshes around Agbabian’s sung mantras, which just as soon pivot into unexpected territories with messages written in blood, tenderness, and possibility. She returns occasionally to auras of meaning, but connects them spontaneously to innermost chambers. “A time to be with you as a time to pray,” she intones, and in that call to psychological arms gives us all the shielding we need to fend for ourselves in a world run emotionally dry. As the first drop in a sprinkling of lyric-based pieces—which also includes the astonishingly cinematic “The Water Bride,” a folk tale rendered in spoken word, and “Mother,” an anthem for all humankind—it is an ocean in the making.

More often, Agbabian takes shelter in absence of words. Drawing a thread of continuity through such diverse selections as the traditional Armenian hymn “Anganim Arachi Ko,” the folk melody “Garun a,” and the original “Seeing More,” she traces that string to a mirror, in whose surface it seems to continue on forever into darkness. In each of these songs she takes a pondering look into the truth of the human condition, naked and vulnerable to pain, and by her very acknowledgment opens herself to intimacies of creation. The latter are best expressed in the fully improvised “The River,” in which she and Stocker add grooves of their own to the other’s sonic fingerprints and which yields the percussionist’s solo vision of “Colored,” which also finds a partner in his haunting “Light Effect.”

Agababian’s pianism shines brightest in “Petal One” and “Petal Two,” both of which presage the natural imagery of “Full Bloom,” and in two further pieces, “Rain Drops” and “Whiteness,” born of suggestions made by producer Manfred Eicher in the studio. But despite the album’s title, we know that most of what we hear is only some of what we get. Like the pinecone held before her face in the cover photograph, Agbabian reveals only the corner of a smile and leaves us free to imagine its curve into melodies yet to be gifted.

Marco Ambrosini/Ensemble Supersonus: Resonances (ECM 2497)

| Tyran Grillo

2497 X

Marco Ambrosini
Ensemble Supersonus
Resonances

Marco Ambrosini nyckelharpa
Anna-Liisa Eller kannel
Anna-Maria Hefele overtone singing, harp
Wolf Janscha Jew’s harp
Eva-Maria Rusche harpsichord, square piano
Recorded November 2015, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Lara Persia
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 21, 2019

Nyckelharpa virtuoso Marco Ambrosini returns to ECM with a project as successful as it is ambitious. In Ensemble Supersonus, he has forged a far-reaching prism through which to shine the light of his neglected forte, and by its rainbow effects a wealth of reimagined material. For Resonances, he is joined by Anna-Liisa Eller on kannel, overtone singer Anna-Maria Hefele, Wolf Janscha on Jew’s harp, and harpsichordist Eva-Maria Rusche.

The album opens with Ambrosini’s unaccompanied “Fuga Xylocopae.” As the keystone to the geometry that follows, it renders an entire world of possibilities, and from that panoply frames eleven further scenes, each more painterly than the last. In its wake, Heinrich Iganz Franz Biber’s “Rosary” Sonata No. 1 gets a chemical peel, touched by Hefele’s blinding inner-space and Rusche’s sparkling plectra. Through it all, Ambrosini’s abilities delight, touching off minutiae that one would never have guessed to be lurking in Biber’s psyche. Music by Johann Jakob Froberger (an e-minor Toccata played on square piano) and Girolamo Frescobaldi (a Prelude and Toccata with added nyckelharpa) flesh out the Biberian zeitgeist.

Although released in 2019, this album was recorded in 2015, one year after the ensemble’s present lineup cohered in a mutual search for ancient and modern music with such Baroque modes as their fulcrum. From the Medieval mysticism of Hildegard von Bingen’s O Antiqui Sancti, made manifest by Hefele’s liminal voicing, to the starkly visual writing within the group, nothing in the program is out of place. In the latter vein, Janscha contributes three compositions: Ananda Rasa, Fjordene, and Ritus. The first and last are statues come to life, actors moving across a silver screen, while the second is a Jew’s harp solo of deepening soul. Rusche adds her own: the kinetic and vivacious Erimal Nopu, a buoyant polyphony of spirits that seems inspired as much by 17th-century harmonies as by Manuel de Falla. As does Hefele, whose 2 Four 8 is a forest of overtones through which a full moon shines.

The traditional Swedish “Polska” widens the ensemble’s meeting ground like antique machinery oiled to renewal. Ambrosini sighs and sings, treating laments as messages in a bottle cracked open only in dreams. Another standout in this fantastical regard is “Hicaz Hümâyan Saz Semâisi” by Veli Dede, whose music has intersected with ECM before via Anouar Brahem’s Conte de l’incroyable amour. Its modal beauties are familiar and forever searching, thus proving that, for all its backward glances, Ensemble Supersonus is looking resolutely forward, as I hope we can to a follow-up in the future.

Sinikka Langeland: The Magical Forest (ECM 2448)

| Tyran Grillo

the-magical-forest

Sinikka Langeland
The Magical Forest

Sinikka Langeland kantele, vocals
Arve Henriksen trumpet
Trygve Seim soprano and tenor saxophones
Anders Jormin double bass
Markku Ounaskari percussion
Trio Mediæval
Anna Maria Friman vocals
Berit Opheim vocals
Linn Andrea Fuglseth vocals
Recorded February 2015 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
U.S. release date: August 5, 2016

On The Magical Forest, Norwegian kantele virtuoso Sinikka Langeland reconvenes her “Starflowers” quintet (with saxophonist Trygve Seim, trumpeter Arve Henriksen, bassist Anders Jormin, and drummer-percussionist Markku Ounaskari), adding to that quilt the patchwork of voices known as Trio Mediæval. Any of these names will be familiar across the spectrum of ECM followers, but their shared love for Scandinavian folk music has never been so clear as in this latest project.

In contrast to previous albums, the kantele is a largely supportive presence, almost airy in its backgrounded-ness. This gives Langeland’s unaffected singing—and, more importantly, the imagery laced into it—room to roam. Of central significance in that regard is the sacredness of space. Not only in the immaterial sense, but also in the physical landscapes of nature at large and their shaping of reality as we’ve come to understand it over millennia of spiritual seeking.

The album’s opening trifecta sets its thematic charge as the rising sun ignites the day into breaking. “Puun Loitsu” (Prayer to the Tree Goddess) is based on a rune song text from the Finnskogen, or Forest Finns, whose migratory settlements in Norway and Sweden have become reliquaries for creation myths and other origin stories, glistening anew in the varnish of Langeland’s diction. The wiry strains of the kantele offer hints of song, which emerges first in monotone before being taken up in Trio Mediæval’s chanting response. “Sammas” crystallizes the running theme in its evocation of the “world pillar” (axis mundi), a column of infinite energy binding Heaven to Earth and circling around the North Star. The lyrics, with their Trinitarian framing, demonstrate one way in which Christian elements have found their way over the centuries into these mystical traditions. The light-bearing qualities of Henriksen’s trumpeting deepen these underlying messages, which “Jacob’s Dream” makes even more apparent. This retelling of the biblical Patriarch’s vision emphasizes the permanence of verticality over the fleetingness of horizontality. The “ladder,” then, is not climbable by the body but constitutes the body itself: a DNA helix spun from godly breath. Once the words are sung, the instrumentalists brilliantly unravel an improvisational second half. Seim’s tenor and Henriksen’s trumpet move in tandem, drawing rungs between them as they travel.

Trees continue to dominate the landscape in “Køyri” and “Karsikko.” The latter, which names a memorial trunk on which the names of the dead are carved, is based on a variant of the hymn “I Know of a Sleep in Jesus’s Name,” and Langeland’s communications with Henriksen make for some picturesque unfolding in both songs. “Pillar to Heaven” likewise strengthens an interconnectedness of things.

As so often happens on a Langeland album, animals figure heavily into the symbolism of The Magical Forest. “The Wolfman” recounts a man named Johan who, according to legend, lived as a wolf yet died as a man. The inseparability of soil and sky resurfaces, as Ounaskari’s cymbals seem to scale the clouds. “Kamui” takes a relatively documentarian turn in its depiction of Hokkaido, Japan’s indigenous Ainu, whose annual ritual killing of a bear cub is described in empathetic detail, while Trio Mediæval intones the titular “Kamui,” an Ainu word meaning “God” and referring to both the sacrifice and the deity honored by it. This leaves only the title track, an instrumental foregrounding the bird-like calls of Seim (now on soprano saxophone) and Henriksen while Jormin’s arco bassing slithers in the underbrush.

All of which makes me think that the album’s title is somewhat misleading. For indeed, what the listener encounters here is not a forest that is magical but a magic that is forested.

(See this article as it originally appeared in RootsWorld online magazine here.)

Vilma Timonen Quartet review for RootsWorld

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Finnish kantele player and singer Vilma Timonen, whose latest quartet album is sure to please fans of Sinikka Langeland. The music is enlivening and evocative, drawing from folk influences in an originally composed storybook of myths, moonlight, and maidens. Click the cover to discover!

Drops