Steindór Andersen
Rímur
Naxos World (2003)
http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/band/disco/steindor.html
http://www.naxos.com/

In 2002, I drove around Iceland alone...literally "around," since the only real route is around the sea-bound perimeter. As a geologist, it was hard to tear myself away from the glaciers and geothermal plants (Iceland's living plants aren't all that entertaining!). However, I did hope to find some real Icelandic traditional music; my own collection was limited to one Icelandica album. After a week on the road passing up albums with happy folk dancers on the cover, I found a copy of Raddir/Voices in an Akureyri gift shop. This classic of vocal field recordings is mentioned in The Rough Guide To World Music...one of only three folk recordings listed! Many of the old songs on Voices are rímur (the plural of ríma), chant-like pieces that up until the first part of the 1900s were sung on the Icelandic farmsteads and other gathering places on cold winter nights .

"Few western nations have lost as much of their cultural heritage in such a short time as have the Icelanders..." reads the copious multilingual liner notes to the Raddir collection. However, a lot of the heritage has been recorded or transcribed, and a few people still do sing rímur. This album, featuring one of the most prominent of modern singers Steindór Andersen, is bravely slashing out a path for Icelandic traditional music here in the USA at $9.99 or less a copy. Oddly, Rímur (clever name!) is released on a budget classical label offshoot! It's a nice album, too, and Steindór's rich and sensitive baritone voice, the major focus of the album, has quite a bit of the presence. Most of the songs are a capella and most were in fact recorded in one of the large old communal farmhouse sleeping lofts or in an old church. Most sound similar to Irish sean nos or verses of the kalevala, isolated and stark, often droning with a characteristic downward hold at the end of the verse, often with melodic nuances.

There are songs from twelve authors on the album; most were alive in 1900, so the album isn't quite as "ancient" as one would first think. A few of the poets lived abroad for a while and two actually ended up writing their rímur on the Canadian prairies! Several songs are about blood and guts Icelandic heroes, but most are about bad weather at sea, nature, buying a horse (!), and life in general. You can't tell this by listening, you have to read the liner notes; even more frustrating for the billions of people on earth who don't read Old Norse is that the lyrics are only printed in Icelandic. Maybe since almost all Icelanders speak English, Steindor should sing in English! Just joking. As with most foreign albums, we are stuck with just listening to the human voice as an instrument, without being able to pick up the story, let alone the word plays.

The arrangements (or lack thereof) and recording space change near the end of the CD. A digeridoo is added to Stefán frá Hvítadal's song about autumn and the end of life making the song even more eerier than a capella. A ríma about the sea by Stephan G. Stephansson ("The Poet of the Rocky Mountains") is sung in ecclesiastical harmony duet. A gentle song about women, as well as two others, are accompanied by Celtic harp...played by someone named Monika. The diversity of these last songs proves to be a little bit more fun! But having a grounding in the unadorned form right here on this particular album is essential, unless you've been trading Icelandic field recording bootlegs.

The tone of Steindór's voice has a tendency to make the music sound a little more stern than some of the archival singers on Voices. You wonder what it was like to sit and listen to these icy rímur on cold winter nights out in the Icelandic expanse. It must have been a little between being at a house concert and sitting in a dorm room swapping guitar songs. Probably the best thing to do with this album is to mentally add on to it, to think of it as a supporting skeleton. Imagine a baby crying and someone on the stairway gulping down Berserkja Brennivín!

Check out the sigur-ros address above for some more ambient samples of Steindór Andersen's singing!

gennett at gorge dot net

The Columbia Gypsy