Tag: 250313

Nordgrass

From Finland, it’s Frigg

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

With a blend of Celtic, American bluegrass, and a Nordic fiddle tradition designated by the UN as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity,” Frigg is truly a world music band. As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, a show in Manchester will dip into their Irish roots while showcasing the lively Nordgrass style that’s made their reputation.

Fans of Nickel Creek will enjoy Frigg’s lively all-instrumental sound. The band was founded in 2000 by sibling fiddlers Alina Kivivuori and Esko Jarvela and mandolin player Petri Prauda. The current lineup includes Juho Kivivuori on double bass, guitarist Topi Korhonen and fiddler Tero Hyväluoma, who played his first Frigg gig in 2005.

In a recent phone interview, Prauda, who along with mandolin also plays cittern and bagpipe, discussed the band’s swing through New England and their music.

“The sound of Frigg comes from a fusion of different musical cultures,” Prauda said, “but especially the Kaustinen fiddle tradition.”

That’s the style selected by UNESCO for its singularity, named after the village in Finland that both Kivivuori and Jarvala hail from; Hyväluoma grew up nearby. It originated in the 17th century and has been passed down for generations, music characterized by a rhythmic sound that’s driven by syncopated bowing.

Their latest album, Dreamscapes, released in February, finds Frigg delicately moving in a new direction. On “Västkusten Twist,” the mood is bouncy, atmospheric, rising symphonically, while “Valsette” has a contemporary flow influenced by the American bluegrass bands they’ve long admired. “Troll’s Twilight” offers chamber music elements.

Some of the change is due to a reconfiguration of the original four fiddle band, due to the departure of Tommi Asplund.

“It was a hard decision for him, and of course, hard for us to let go of him,” Prauda explained, “but we decided we try to continue with three fiddles now only…. There’s some arranging work to be done, but we have been touring every now and then a few times with just three fiddles previously.”

The work on the new record began a couple of years ago with informal composition camps.

“We were thinking, what can we do that we haven’t tried yet, so we tried this time a bit more experimental approach,” Prauda said, adding with a laugh that he felt, after a recent relisten, “it just sounded like Frigg to me. So maybe these experiments are quite subtle.”

The band’s name comes from the Nordic goddess of love and wisdom. “Which I think are really great values today … look at the news; it seems like we need more love and wisdom in the world,” Prauda observed. “But the name got picked out just simply. We were looking in a dictionary and it was one of the first names that somehow stuck out there for us.”

Initially they were unaware of how people in the U.S. use the word, but there’s a song on 2017’s Frost on Fiddles called “Friggin’ Polska,” and Prauda acknowledges “there are many things in the world connected to Frigg … yoga, hippie things or cafes, but we didn’t think of that at the time at all. We just thought it’s a cool name.”

Frigg has many Polska dance songs in its repertoire. The lively style had its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries and is usually played in three-quarter time, “but there are many different kinds,” Prauda explained. “Slower and faster, and the rhythmic phrasing can be very different…. It became a very popular dance in Sweden, and Finland, especially.”

Though it’s true no one sings in Frigg, Prauda notes, “We have put a lot of effort in thinking and planning and practicing how the energy in the music flows in which direction, so that when you make purely instrumental music, it still has some kind of feeling, a storyline, mental landscapes, images. I think that is quite characteristic to Frigg’s music.”

Frigg

When: Friday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Dana Center (Saint Anselm College), 100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester
Tickets: $45 at anselm.edu

Frigg. Photo by Marek Sabogal.

The Music Roundup 25/03/13

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

Stories and dance: Michael Londra brings his PBS series Ireland With Michael to the stage. The show blends music, dance and stories, as the Emmy-nominated Voice of Riverdance shares his affinity with them, backed by a traditional Irish band and dancers. Thursday, March 13, 7 p.m., Stockbridge Theatre, 5 Pinkerton St., Derry, $35 and up at stockbridgetheatre.com.

• What’s up sweetcakes? Enjoy jazz inspired by a popular anime series at Cowboy Bebop Live. Japanese composer Yoko Kanno’s music helped drive the edgy Japanese series, from her earworm theme song “Ask DNA” to the jumping jazz number that opened the 2001 movie, “TANK!” An all-star 14-piece ensemble performs in support of the big-screen multimedia presentation Friday, March 14, 8 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $39 at etix.com

• Long green weekend: Four days of St. Patrick’s fun commences with Shamrock & Roll-themed music bingo from DJ Paul Corwin on Friday night, with Celtic band Loch Mór and the Pogues-inspired Rebel Collective the next day. Sunday, it’s music from the Reel McCoys and a set from McGonagle School of Irish Dance. Dan Fallon performs on the big day. Friday, March 14, through Monday, March 17, Biergarten, 221 DW Highway, Merrimack; schedule at budweisertours.com.

• Canyon lady’s prime: Drawing primarily from her 1970s heyday, The Linda Ronstadt Experience is a stirring tribute. American Idol Season 15 contestant Tristan McIntosh is convincing on ballads like “Long Long Time” and “Blue Bayou,” the Roy Orbison song she made her own, and shines on the early hit “Different Drum.” She’s a believable doppelgänger for Ronstadt as well. Saturday, March 15, 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $39 at palacetheatre.org.

• Cross-Canadian Celtic: Hailing from Ontario, The Glengarry Bhoys occupy a unique musical intersection, blending Highland Scots, Irish and French Canadian idioms for a thrilling and energetic performance. Given the Celtic flavor of the band’s sound, they’re an especially popular item around St. Patrick’s Day, where they perform plenty of traditional songs along with their original material. Sunday, March 16, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $39 at tupelohall.com.

Mickey 17 (R)

Robert Pattinson plays a man who agrees to be killed over and over again in service to an interplanetary colonization mission in 2054 in Mickey 17, a sci-fi comedy from Bong Joon Ho.

Because he first agreed to participate in some scheme involving macarons proposed by on-the-make friend Timo (Steven Yeun, having fun being wonderfully sleazy), mid-21st-century goober Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) owes a lot of money to a sadistic, well-connected loan shark. He can’t pay so he decides to flee Earth entirely and join a space mission to Niflheim, which is being touted as a, like, big beautiful planet that humanity will populate with the true believers of Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a failed politician who is a mix of petty man-baby and tech weirdo. Mickey agrees to serve as an Expendable — someone whose physical body is scanned and whose mind and soul are downloaded into a backup drive. He does dangerous work, mostly for experiment purposes, like going out in the highly radioactive environment of space to see how long it takes him to die. When he does die from radiation or intentional poisoning to test a new chemical or whatever, a new Mickey body is printed out from a 3D printer that uses the ship’s organic waste as the printing material. His soul is uploaded to it, making him a seamless Mickey with basically all of the previous lives’ memories.

Though being sold as some kind of “pure” paradise, Niflheim is actually an ice- and snow-covered planet that is home to a highly lethal virus and to large, rolly tardigrade-meets-millipede-like creatures. After scientists kill Mickey with the virus over and over to create a vaccine, the humans can set out to explore the planet, which is how Mickey 17, that is the 17th iteration of Mickey, comes to fall through some ice and is left for certain death.

But Mickey doesn’t die. He’s found and rescued by the Creepers, as the people have taken to calling the wormy but rather cuddly creatures. He trudges back to the ship that is still serving as everyone’s home base and learns that he, 17, has been so written off that the scientists have already printed out a Mickey 18, a Mickey 18 who is hanging out in Mickey’s apartment waiting for the Mickeys’ girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie).

Robert Pattinson really does seem to be having maximum fun with Mickey. I need to stop being surprised by what a great job Pattinson does with playing weirdos. He fully dives in to the Mickeys, who are similar but not quite the same. OG Mickey is twitchy and desperate not to be sawed in pieces by a loan shark. Timo describes Mickey 17 as “the soft one.” Mickey 18 has a hair trigger and is full of righteous, if not entirely focused, rage. Pattinson makes these Mickeys, especially 17 and 18, the two we spend the most time with, distinct oddballs.

Also going big is Ruffalo, who is, however consciously, doing a Trump riff — Trump with a side of Musk and I felt sort of pre-exhausted at the notion that a good chunk of culture for the next four years will likely be wrestling with these personalities. Marshall, setting off to be ruler of his planet, is joined by his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), a deranged political wife of the old school (the canny member of the pair) who is obsessed with ideas of refined civilization. They are A Lot, these characters, and the movie maybe does more “do you Get It?” with them than it needs to.

Ultimately, Pattinson saves this movie from just being, like, cheap sketch comedy about This Moment We’re In. He keeps the action nicely off-kilter and helps add heart to the story. B In theaters

Featured Image: Mickey 17 (R)

Ends of the Earth, by Neil Shubin


(Dutton, 235 pages)

Unless visiting all seven continents is on your bucket list, you probably don’t think a lot about the northern and southernmost parts of the planet. The Arctic and Antarctica make for a good documentary every couple of years (Antarctica: A Year on Ice and March of the Penguins come to mind) but then the subject retreats for most of us, ice usually confined to a rink or a drink. Not so for scientists like Neil Shubin who have spent years journeying to places with temperatures most rational people would rather avoid.

In Ends of the Earth, Shubin recounts his polar experiences, which began when he pitched a tent as a student with three other researchers in Greenland in 1988. Just staying alive in such an unforgiving landscape is a challenge, and when gear or equipment breaks there is no Amazon delivery.

And yet, “There is something almost magical about living in an environment where the sun never sets for a month or more while being disconnected from the rest of humanity,” Shubin writes. “Running streams exiting melting glaciers hold water so pure we drink it unfiltered from the source. Every babbling glacial brook could be a water fountain or, for extraordinarily hearty souls, a bath.” Isolated with a few others sharing the experience, “The world becomes small and intense.” Shubin isn’t a travel writer, but he might as well be, with the sheen he puts on the arctic experience.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 established that the continent, most of which is layer upon layer of ice, be used for scientific study; since then 29 countries have established 70 research bases, the most prominent of which is the U.S.-run McMurdo Station, where more than 1,000 people work during the summer, 300 in winter. (Fun fact: You can take a break from watching live panda or eagle cams and watch McMurdo cam on a government website, at least until Elon Musk finds out about it.)

There, one of the exercises new researchers experience early on is a “mock crevasse rescue” — highlighting that one of the dangers of living in this environment is falling into a practically invisible 200-foot crack in the ice. There are methods to pull people out, but still not everyone survives, and honestly, the photograph of a massive crevasse in this book is the stuff of nightmares for people who don’t enjoy being cold. Astonishingly, a member of Shubin’s team volunteered to be lowered into a crevasse so the group could practice a rescue, and he was so moved by the beauty of what he saw that “his shouts from 20 feet down were as if he was undergoing religious ecstasy.”

In fact, there seems to be a scientific ecstasy that permeates polar research with its out-of-this-world experiences and extraordinary sights, such as blue ice, ancient ice that looks like a “shiny version of an aquamarine” and which, when melted to drink, “means consuming water from snow that fell when Neanderthals roamed the Earth,” Shubin writes.

While the Arctic region is inhospitable to humans and most forms of flora and fauna we know, it has its own hardy life, including a tree called the Arctic willow, which instead of growing upward grows sideways and either atop the ground or below it. (Arctic leaf peepers will want to know that the leaves of this tree turn orange in August.)

And life in Antarctica includes cousins to New England’s woolly bear caterpillars, the fuzzy ones with the weather-predicting stripes. In the Arctic they spend most of their life frozen and awaken only for a few summer months to feed on willow leaves before freezing solid again. This cycle occurs for seven to 15 years, Shubin writes, until the caterpillar becomes a moth and lives out the rest of its short life: “Nearly a decade of freezing and thawing, feeding, and basking, all the while avoiding predators, is all in the service of two weeks of flying and mating.”

Shubin walks us through the science of how animals survive polar temperatures — and humans, too, including the story of a skier who had an accident that left her mostly submerged in ice for more than an hour. After she was cut from the ice, doctors were able to restart her heart at a hospital. She eventually made a full recovery. Shubin quotes a doctor who says, “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead” — miserable as it may be, cold often works in the service of life.

Scientists working in polar regions deal with the cold with a combination of high-tech clothing and purposeful exercise. “I’ll routinely do abdominal crunches when I get into my cold sleeping bag before going to sleep each night. The burst of activity makes for a cozy furnace inside,” Shubin writes.

It is asides like these that make Ends of the Earth mostly compelling even though Shubin, ever the scientist, at times teeters into AP science class mode. Now a professor at the University of Chicago, he comes by that naturally, yet his ability to make science engaging resulted in a PBS series based on his 2008 book Your Inner Fish. Credit Shubin, also, with the ability to write seriously about climate change in an apolitical manner. He is an observer, not a flamethrower, and yet wants all of us to consider what will happen as ocean levels rise up to 120 feet in the next few centuries. (There will be more wooly bear caterpillars for one thing.)

Shubin recalls the famous commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in which the late author describes a fish asking another, “What is water?” In Ends of the Earth he invites us to consider what is ice other than an annoyance glazing our driveways. The answers are more complex than we might think. B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Ends of the Earth, by Neil Shubin

Album Reviews 25/03/13

Free Range, Lost & Found (self-released)

’Tis the season for music journalists getting inundated with spam from agents and record companies whose artists are scheduled to perform on various stages at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. This year’s conference ends on Saturday, March 15, so if you’re down in Austin reading this remotely, there might still be time to plan a visit to this person’s 8:15 p.m. show on the 15th at the Dear Life Showcase, which’ll be held at All The Sudden. The nym belongs to one Sofia Jensen of Chicago, who previously dazzled listeners with her 2023 album Practice; the overall vibe is easy listening Americana with lots of quirky but eminently listenable indie-weirdness on board. Lots of Norah Jones energy going on here, of course, but with a few vocally acrobatic twists; in the dobro-washed bluegrass tune “Storm” she browses the scale like a savvy farmers market shopper, finding hidden jewels of melody that are pretty unique. Well worth your time. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Good Looks, Lived Here For A While (Keeled Scales Records)

Also performing on SXSW’s final day is this hometown Austin four-piece, who gravitate to feel-good rock that combines jam band, alt-country and ’90s radio-indie in fun ways. That’s not to say they aren’t serious-minded; the lyrics on this one take jabs at such things as “job creators” (“they’re just stealing our labor”) and that sort of thing, and besides, they’ve got plenty to be existentially discombobulated about; while leaving the venue where they’d just played the record release show for their critically acclaimed 2022 debut LP Bummer Year, lead guitarist Jake Ames was hit by a car crossing the street, fracturing his skull and tailbone. This album almost never happened, in other words, but after a lot of rehab and despair they’ve cobbled a seriously listenable set of songs reminiscent of Barenaked Ladies duking it out with Tom Petty (“If It’s Gone”) and Hank Williams Jr. (“Can You See Me Tonight”) in a dark alley. I couldn’t hate these guys if I tried. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Today we’ll talk about the albums coming out on March 14, because that makes perfect sense, like it wouldn’t be timely or hip to talk about some military coronet album that came out in 1918, now would it? Unfortunately, the first thing we’ll need to talk about here is the fast-approaching 12th album from Nyack, New York’s favorite (because there aren’t any others) progressive-rock band, Coheed and Cambria! That band, as everyone knows, is cut from the same cloth as Mars Volta, Thank You Scientist and Muse, specializing in the sort of arena-rock style invented by Queen, whose albums were mostly comprised of half-written obnoxious filler tunes with one or two overwritten orchestral pieces added into the mix to get musically untrained critics to write nice things about them. Ahem, in the hierarchy of musical genres, Coheed and all those guys occupy the rung that sits just under Tool, Pendulum and Linkin Park; Coheed’s stuff is music for people whose post-grad sensibilities demand that they not get caught listening to actual techie-prog-metal because they don’t want to scare off future employers, so what Coheed does instead is throw a bunch of random musical notes in a blender and hope to attract the sort of listener who takes LinkedIn seriously (have you guys ever watched any of LinkedIn’s user-submitted short videos? They’re all basically “career-promotional videos,” starring and written by people who double-majored in marketing and business, and any time they come within a country mile of criticizing anything about corporate culture that obviously bugs them, a chimpanzee in a power suit zaps ‘em with a taser and they get back to the script). Anyway, if that describes you, and you want to stick with listening to anodyne milquetoast tripe instead of something interesting like Pendulum or Mozart, then Coheed’s new album, The Father Of Make Believe, is for you! Yup, like Billy The Exterminator used to say, I can’t wait to get my hands on this horrible new critter and tell you good folks all about it! So the single, “Searching for Tomorrow,” is like Linkin Park doing power pop, like, if Beavis and Butthead had jobs as human resources directors, they’d totally head-bang to it. If Dashboard Confessional had rabies it’d probably sound something like this (lightbulb moment: I’m going to start calling this band “LinkedIn Park!”).

• Circuit des Yeux is the stage name of Chicago-based singer/songwriter Haley Fohr, whose four-octave vocal range is a big deal to people who don’t like normal singing but instead prefer people who can both squeak like a Munchkin and mumble like Lurch from The Addams Family! While we’re on the subject, I always thought the super-high notes on allegedly four-octave-range-possessing chanteuse Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” were generated by a computer, but this multi-talented blah blah blah person’s new album is called Halo On The Inside, and it spotlights a Trent Reznor-sounding single called “Megaloner” where she sings like the dude from Roxy Music, which is impressive.
• Electronic rock band Courting is from Liverpool, England, which goes to show you that not every band from Liverpool is as famous as The Beatles. Their new album Lust for Life has a single, “Pause At You,” that sounds like Aha meets Gang Of Four meets Hives; it’s OK.

• And finally we have Whatever the Weather, which is what British electronic producer/musician Loraine James likes calling herself in order to confuse old people or something. Whatever The Weather II is her new album, with the single “12°C,” a sluggish noise-electro ambient thingamajig that goes nowhere, but they’re your ears. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Free Range, Lost & Found (self-released) & Good Looks, Lived Here For A While (Keeled Scales Records)

The Daydream of Milky Joe

At the moment, I am working on a project that involves thinking deeply about a couple of cows celebrating a Girls’ Night Out. Never mind why. That just seems to be where my life is right now — thinking about cow girlfriends at a bar, laughing, drinking and flirting with a rugged beefcake of a stranger, only to find out to their chagrin that he is an ox. (Look it up.)

The obvious question as far as I’m concerned is this: What would they drink?

Initially the answer seems obvious: white Russians, or mudslides, or something with cream in it. But I can imagine the conversations the cows would have:

“Really? Drinking our own body fluids? Doesn’t that seem a little — wrong?”

Then there are obvious plays on words — moo-tinis, moo-garitas or moo-jitos, but I’m not entirely sure how one would go about making them.

Then, out of nowhere, as often happens when one opens oneself up to the Universe, I discovered a drink called The Nightmare of Milky Joe. I don’t know where the name comes from — there’s no dairy in it — but it sounded promising. After some tinkering, a surprisingly delicious not-quite-tiki drink came into focus.

Let’s call it —

The Daydream of Milky Joe

1 flavorful jalapeño pepper – it would be nice if it had some heat, but it is more important that it has good flavor

1 ounce golden rum

1 ounce dark rum

1 ounce sweet coconut cream – Coco Lopez is a classic brand, but there are other good ones, so use whichever one brings joy to your life

½ ounce crème de banana

½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

4 ounce grapefruit soda – I like Pink Ting, but Jarritos or Fresca would work well too

Roughly chop the jalapeño, and muddle it in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. (This means crush it with a cocktail muddler, a wooden spoon, or a small soda bottle.)

Add the dark and gold rums, then dry shake the mixture — shake it without ice. Flavorful chemicals in a chili pepper, including capsaicin, the one that makes it taste hot, are soluble in alcohol, but not in water, so shaking the crushed jalapeño with alcohol before adding any watery ingredients will help extract heat and flavor into the cocktail.

Add ice, the coconut cream, crème de banana, and lime juice, then shake again, until you hear the ice start to break up.

Strain the mixture over crushed ice in the fanciest glass you own, then top it with grapefruit soda and stir.

This drink is something truly rare in this weary world: a happy surprise. Rum and coconut obviously go well together, but the surprise comes in how much the jalapeño and lime add to this enterprise. We’ve established on many occasions that lime is everybody’s friend. It is super friendly with rum, and delightful with coconut, but if you think about it for a moment, it is also really, really good with chilis; think of a fresh salsa. The lime is a bridge from Spice City to Smooth Town, and the grapefruit soda is the water under it.

Featured Photo: The Daydream of Milky Joe. Photo by John Fladd.

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