Nordic Roots - Nordic Fronds

Marty Lipp talks with 2 movers and shakers on the scene, Stefan Brisland-Ferner and Olov Johansson

While a growing number of young musicians are pushing Scandinavian folk music in every direction, from psychedelia to chamber music, the music has still not found its rightful audience.

I've been pushing Nordic music on people for years, and even among world-music fans, I've found a puzzling amount of resistance. Perhaps it's because the musicians generally don't wear colorful native garb and actually look like the grad students they are. Maybe their polskas and schottishes have pulses too unfamiliar to ears acclimated to aggressively addictive beats. Whatever the reasons, the opportunity is now knocking, with bands touring and new CDs being released at a fast pace.

The current Scandinavian folk music scene follows an initial discovery during the "Green Wave" hippie movement of the late 1960s. As one musician recalled, it was a time of "peace, love and folk fiddles" with music that was well-intentioned, but not always very good. During the late 1980s young musicians honed their skills in newly minted academic settings. Perhaps it was partly in response to the unification of Europe, but these musicians dug into their own cultural heritage and transformed it from a modern perspective.

Olov Johansson of V�sen, said that hundreds of young people apply now to the Royal Academy of Stockholm to study folk music, while classical music enrollment is declining. "There's still lots of freedom in [folk music], you can find your own voice."

The current movement can be roughly split into an acoustic wing, which can be earthy or close to classical; and an electric wing, which comprises rockers and Gothic-tinged experimenters.

V�sen plays "high-energy, acoustic-powered music," in the words of Johansson, who plays the nyckelharpa, which looks like a sort of Frankenfiddle, with large keys sticking out the side of its fret board. When musicians play acoustically, Johansson said, "you can really hear and tell if people are making an effort to play....You can't turn a knob, you have to work hard." By plugging in, he said, a musician "puts a barrier" between themselves and the audience. "I want to unwrap [the music]," he said.

Though V�sen now composes its own tunes modeled on traditional styles, Johansson has studied the old songs since he was a teen. Speaking about the old musicians he called "my musical ancestors," he said, "In some ways, I know them better than my genetic ancestors, dealing with the same musical material, playing for dances, for people....It's not so much a conversation, as I feel I have received something to use from them."

One group that represents the electric wing of Nordic neo-traditionalists is Garmarna. The group is aiming to release a new album next year, as well as one with excerpts from a theater score. One of Garmarna's founders, Stefan Brisland-Ferner said that when the group released an album of songs by Hildegard von Bingen in 2001, "We didn't have a natural path to follow � it felt wrong to go back, but it felt impossible to go further than on that album."

The band, named for the dog that guards the gates of the land of the dead, was formed in 1990 after the three original members saw a production of Hamlet with some progressive Swedish folk music.

"We don't come from the perspective of folk music to start with. The idea for the band doesn't come from a rock view either. But individually we have a taste for alternative rock, country, electronica, industrial and so on. We got turned on by the folk music of Sweden and a certain style and feel in that genre. So as a band of music lovers of different sorts, we wanted to go hard core folk � getting to the core by entering the genre from the outside and then work ourselves out again � if that makes sense. We don't try hard to do something strange or try to clash genres for the sake of it."

The three novices eventually began to take up folk music for fun, then "slipped" into the music industry. "We were drawn to [folk music]," Brisland-Ferner said, "but we have never in any way been thinking that we are a part of the tradition. I realize that's wrong now, but I see this band as standing a bit outside that scene. I can't say this enough. We don't want to modernize folk music or do crazy things with it, we are filtering a lot of music through the band and we use what we have to achieve what we want. I guess I would say it's an extension of what came before, in the sense that I think people thought about the music the same way when it was not looked upon as 'traditional' music. You learned from the past and lived in the present, which sounds healthy to me."

Speaking of the difference between today's folk music and that of centuries past, Brisland-Ferner said, contemporary folk "is informed by the outer world a lot more. And when it's informed by the outer world it's impossible that it would be unaffected by that. Regional dialects in playing techniques are known by everyone and you use different stylings at different times. Of course this means there is more of a conformity in the playing, that might also have to do with different trends. Also, international influences have played a huge part in how folk music is being performed today. Plus, the music schools. People play much 'better.'"

Teaming with Tots Matson Of Hedningarna, Brisland-Ferner has also recently released Prototyp (Northside), which reinvents the one-stringed Swedish hurdy-gurdy by playing it through a bank of electronic pedals, gizmos and synthesizers. While the entire album is composed of sounds originating on the almost extinct folk instrument, it sounds like a progressive rock band pushing the sonic envelope.

Contrasting the sound of Swedish folk today and yesterday, Brisland-Ferner said the music was essentially the same, "But, of course, it sounds dramatically different, you can't compare it really. But I think people always like a good hook and a great beat. The music has had different purposes as well. But there are a lot of things that they have in common."

Just as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan catapulted American folk into myriad pop styles, these bands are reinventing their heritage, artist by singular artist. Hopefully, their wildly divergent sounds will catch the ears of stateside listeners.