Benedicte Maurseth – Hárr
Hubro – Out Now
Few musical instruments are as inextricably bound up with a particular place as the Hardanger fiddle, an eight- or nine-stringed variant on the violin from the Hardanger region of south-west Norway. It is a unique object, often ornate in design but capable of creating a sound that resonates with wildness. It has been used for centuries in dances and religious ceremonies. However, it is equally suited – perhaps even more so – to modern compositions where minimalism, drone and atonality are to the forefront.
Benedicte Maurseth is a champion of the Hardanger fiddle and one of its most fearsomely talented players. She is well-versed in traditional material, contemporary composition and improvisational performance. Since 2006, she has collaborated with fellow fiddle maestro Knut Hamre, recorded traditional tunes on the oldest working example of her instrument and composed music for lyrics by the critically lauded novelist and playwright Jon Fosse.
On her new album, Hárr, her collaborators are, for the most part, the birds and insects and mammals of her native patch of rural Norway, as well as the recorded voices of her forefathers. The rock ptarmigan, the great snipe and the mountain owl are afforded equal billing with multi-instrumentalist Håkon Mørch Stene and bassist Mats Eilertsen. This evident closeness to the landscape filters through into the music. In fact, a sense of place saturates Hárr from the opening notes of Augnast, which begins like an icier version of the Twin Peaks theme but soon warms and softens, Maurseth’s fiddle given space Eilertsen’s electronics and Stein Urheim’s widescreen, wide-eyed take on production. It is the kind of music that immediately situates you somewhere specific, an ancient place, despite the modernity of the sound.
Helio riffs on a simple bird call, the musicians adding layers of complexity that build on – but never part with – the initial, natural sounds. A guest appearance from saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm situates the piece somewhere between folk and experimental jazz but never feels confined by either of those labels. Space, repetition and a subtle building of mood and atmosphere are what’s important here, rather than any concession to virtuosity. If anything makes this album feel virtuosic, it is the sheer uniqueness of the sound (something it shares, incidentally, with the minimal rural modernism of Jon Fosse’s prose; it’s no coincidence that a number of Fosse’s novels contain characters who play the Hardanger fiddle).
Reinsdyrbjøller is still more meditative, the reindeer bells of the title providing a serene randomness reminiscent of something John Cage might have composed using the I Ching. Eidfyrder is more brooding, stormier. A reminder, perhaps, that wild landscapes are untameable and not always welcoming to the presence of humans.
On the brisk title track, the fiddles flit and flicker alongside electronic wails and whistles and nimble percussion. Hreinn once again begins in the place where animal and bird sounds meet human music, the border between the two shifting and melting in a manner that is almost hallucinatory, leading to a thick, woozy, drone-laden conclusion. Hárr’s closing piece, Snø Over Sysendalen, is a slow-building winterscape, full of repeated percussive flurries and short, sharp squalls of fiddle.
The most challenging and perhaps most rewarding moments on Hárr are its two collage pieces (Kollasj I and Kollasj II), which showcase the album’s most unusual aspects: the recorded voices of Maurseth’s ancestors. The first is simultaneously eerie and reassuring, as only voices from the past can be: it consists of interviews with Maurseth’s great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather. The second trails off into Eilertsen’s bubbling double bass line, an impressionistic soundscape sandwiched between the earthy snippets of speech.
Norwegian record label Hubro has become almost as much of a fixture in its country’s musical make-up as the Hardanger fiddle itself. It is dedicated to jazz and folk-based music that is immersive, improvisational, and uncompromising. Maurseth ticks all those boxes, and Hárr swells with a quiet beauty and bites with a keen experimental edge.
Hárr is out now. Order via Bandcamp: