Named a migratory bird found in both Scandinavia and the UK and known for its beautiful song, Siskin Quartet is a meeting of two established folk duos. Swedish-English Bridget Marsden and Leif Ottosson, and Scottish-Finnish-Norwegian Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola. Both duos already create visceral atmospheric captivating music independently, navigating a hinterland between Scottish traditional music and cinematic expansive Scandinavian traditional music. As a quartet they are as twisty and turny as a Scandinavian Scottish Instrumental four piece Pentangle. The playing can be dense and full of folk references as it is on Sarah-Jane’s “The Peewit” or it can be deconstructed Psych Folk like the utterly bewitching “Albatrossi”. If Stephan Micus and John Renbourn had ever recorded an ECM album, improvising to the view of the endless sea then it would have sounded like this. Summers’ fiddle creates sea like atmospherics behind Silvola’s gently pulsing guitar until the fiddle joins the melody line. The second fiddle and the guttural drone of Ottosson’s accordion join to create gliding albatross perfection. The wordless vocals from the quartet, as pastoral as the best of Norma Winstone add another almost impossible layer of perfection in an utterly captivating closing track. “The Peewit” is a beautiful piece of Folk Music, with an opening that is dancing fiddles and guitar and a middle with an accordion part that is expansive Terry Riley and mystic fiddles. Bridget Marsden’s “April Rain” is a slower feast, with spiralling instruments suggesting dripping branches and falling rain. The arrangement ebbs and flows, using space to hold your interest. “The Siskin Reel” has a wonderful sense of movement and bird call like notes from Lief. Ottosson’s “Eagle Huntress” is another expansive soundscape and is dedicated to Aisholpan Nurgaiv, who is the first person in her Kazakh family in 12 generations to be trained to hunt with golden eagles. The band conjure perfectly the majesty and power of flight. “Midnattssol” is a wedding waltz with Juhani’s huge sounding electric guitar notes grounding the soaring fiddles and accordion. An impressionistic tone poem, “Morning Green” is a musical cry to open the window and let the green in. Once again those bird song fiddles and the expansive Americana guitar flutter and call very agreeably. The Desert Blues of the Tuareg inhabits the raw burning “Firefinch” with stunning guitar and Bluegrass fiddle that shimmer somewhere between North America and North Africa, migrating within the piece like the Siskin. A curious restless music too angry for dance but too charged for passive listening. “Time Flies” is a more traditional folk piece, impeccably played this is the first tune the quartet played together.
A triumphant album from four players who manage to be restful and restless, soothing and searing within 9 tracks and 45 minutes of music. Recommended without reservation this set is by turns thoughtful and surprising, but never difficult, with stately dance music, red hot dirty guitar and ethereal mood music all impeccably recorded and sequenced.
Marc Higgins 07/11/22
https://sarah-janesummers.bandcamp.com/album/flight-paths
Eighth Nerve Audio 9 tracks
Time Past and Time Passing 