Wildbirds and Peacedrums - The Flight of the Drums

Swedish duo Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin come from the Academy of Music and Drama in Goteborg; partners in life, since 2005 they have also shared the artistic project Wildbirds & Peacedrums. A musical fusion conceived as a conceptual "escape" from the rigidity of academic schemes, able to turn considerable technical skill into something truly unusual and astonishing within today's Swedish scene.

The duo's first sonic sparks took shape not amid the enchanting landscapes of the county of Västra Götalands, but on the fiery streets of old Berlin, long a cradle for remarkable talents arriving from every corner of Europe. Indeed, it's in the heart of Germany that the two young lovers took their first significant steps, taking part in an impressive series of events and moving between art galleries, private clubs and top-tier independent festivals.

What sets the sonic fabric of Wildbirds & Peacedrums apart is a properly classical background, combined with a strong leaning toward a jazzy & bluesy approach. The pair set out to unsettle the listener with marvelous drums-and-voice pop songs, laid over delicate, lively acoustic shades of experimental candor. Wallentin brings to mind several overlooked queens of the rock firmament (and beyond). At times she sounds like Patty Waters's granddaughter playing at being the grandmother, gripping the microphone with the same "delicate" madness, while the drums - always finely calibrated by her beloved Andreas, now gentle and caressing, now confused and strikingly full-blooded - serve as the central engine driving her vocal outbursts. The lyrics too, shaped by a fiery, pragmatic poetics, fully bear out this dual tendency, and are often marked by an intense expressive tension, through which (dis)illusion, sadness and an unrestrained faith in life run side by side.

The duo's debut, Heartcore (2008), slipped quietly onto the crowded Swedish scene toward the end of 2007, even though the first recordings date back to the previous year. At first, the album remained suspended in the limbo of the vast Scandinavian musical firmament. Only a few months later did a Leaf agent decide to carry it beyond its home borders, giving us one of the most disorienting works of recent years.

We start from the origin, from the blues. Wallentin's vocal cords take off with surgical composure, a burning-hot voice that dances on velvet, holding close a soft aura of epic transcendence. The album's structure has no fixed coordinates: there's all the psych-folk obliqueness of lost times (listen to "A Story From A Chair" or the xylophone-laced "Lost Love" and try not to connect them in your mind to the acid parallelograms of beloved Linda Perhacs — it's a truly difficult task); suddenly you stumble into a filo-funk-punk immediacy (!) ("Doubt/Hope") that you really don't expect, or into a sudden trance flower power for solo voice and drumsticks ("The Window"), before the bass drum takes possession of the lean rhythm section.

But the highest point is to be found entirely within the scant three minutes of "Nakina": a Zen climax "defaced" by Werliin's pachydermic stride, with Wallentin wandering ecstatically through her own ecstatic Karesansui (it is, if nothing else, a contemplative snapshot of love's sublime paths and its meditative inlays).

Heartcore finds its greatest strength in the original alternation of the solutions it adopts. While remaining anchored to a free-form approach, the two academic geniuses perfectly succeed in their aim of subverting the core of a light indie-pop song, shifting it onto the percussion-voice axis with surprising results.

The album is warmly received by much of European critics, and suddenly pushes Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin toward broader territories. What truly seduces is the vehement expressive theatricality, fused through sudden jolts of voodoo collapse, condensed into an adventurous attitude aimed at balancing melody with oddball rhythmic tricks. In this sense, the unusual use of occasional instruments dismantles the harmonic scaffolding, wearing it down and reassembling it without pause. The result is performances marked by an executional essentialism meant to shake body and soul without resorting to additional elements. A formula of intent where screams, echoes, unsettling howls drive jingling sounds, devastating rhythmic patterns and vintage blues roughness.

But it's Mariam's innate theatricality that moves us most. Punk anguish, sudden songwriting calm, jazz appeal, and blues orgasm mix in an organic dance of sinuous movements, raising and interlocking emotions over a soft carpet of gospel heterodoxy. The duo's expressive urgency finds its ideal refuge in the aesthetic improvisation of the cultured Swedish mermaid.

The natural continuation of one of the most disarming "pop" formulas of recent years reaches full fruition in The Snake (2009), the second album by Wildbirds & Peacedrums, released in Sweden in 2008 but distributed by Leaf in the rest of Europe only in early 2009.

Once again, the newlywed duo don't give up xylophones, kalimba, steel pan, flutes, harmonicas, gu zheng, santoor, autoharp and taut drumskins, giving life to a sacred dance enacted in celebration of an untamed blues purism, driven by Wallentin's vocal hypnosis, ever more at ease with the rhythmic patterns imposed by her beloved Andreas. Everything flows with pastoral vehemence. The music is itself a bare theatrical representation, through which voice and percussion embody the raw spirit of its primary intent. Jazzy primitivism and pop fantasy mark musical territories that are deserted only in appearance, where melodic nuances and stylistic detours blend in unison, sometimes following unusual Japanese instrumental customs.

The spiritual intro of "Island" is a kind of pagan prayer, recited with anguish and meditation by Mariam Wallentin in the guise of a priestess. And it serves as a divine prelude to the percussive apocalypse of "There Is No Light". The rhythmic lightheartedness of "Places" calms the tones and further shuffles the deck, complete with a playful uh-uh-uh and liberating howls, while "Great Lines" relights the torches and sets off again with phlegmatic choral unity, before blossoming into an epic finale, with every instrument straining to reproduce a true Kagura. It's the apotheosis of the voice-rhythm partnership.

Closing this orgiastic fusion of overlapping voices and obsessive tribalisms are the joint lament of "Who Hoho Ho" and the rays of light projected by Werliin onto his own bass drum in "My Heart".

With The Snake, the Swedish duo further proved just how simple it can be to place rhythmic and melodic essentialism at the core of their own being and becoming in music.

A year later, Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin decided it would be a good idea to merge the two EPs "Retina" and "Iris" into a single album, thus giving life to the third record of their career. Recorded and composed during a long stay in the remote lands of Iceland, Rivers brings out new moods in the Swedish couple. A work inevitably shaped by the stylistic ambiguity of the two halves it's made of, where in the first half of the record the drums unexpectedly give way to the choral whispers of Reykjavík's Schola Cantorum (curated for the occasion by Hildur Gudnadottir), inserted into the context to highlight the improbable choral pairing strongly desired by the Scandinavian duo, aimed at emphasizing the melodies in a kind of pagan mass, with Wallentin front and center, momentarily freed from the accordion and other instruments, and the choir inflicting a healthy dose of austerity.

It's a seductive, courageous formula, through which a partial departure from the gospel-blues timbre of the two splendid previous records shines through.

The five tracks of "Retina" are all too marked by the presence of the Icelandic choir, a perpetual backdrop to Wallentin's recitative singing, perpetually alternating between low and high registers with due academic mastery. The second part of the album, "Iris", is made of entirely different stuff, introduced by a warped, liquid accordion, with good old Werliin in the role of the indomitable percussionist that (almost) everyone knows. An Eastern-leaning mood, rhythmic minimalism, and a more pop-leaning vocation bring everything back to already well-trodden paths.

Given its substance, Rivers is an album destined to divide, and it could hardly be otherwise.

Three years later, Wallentin decides to go it alone for a bit with her solo project Mariam The Believer, seeking a momentary escape from the duo's experimental dwellings. For the indomitable Swedish artist, the time has thus come to hide behind a new mask that can give free rein to her, at times overt, "pop" instinct. After all, that she was the melodic soul of Wildbirds & Peacedrums had always been quite clear to everyone, since the wonderful days of Heartcore. In truth, the idea of starting a parallel project arose after she moved for a while to the Big Apple, intending to find new inspiration, new lifeblood to feed her artistic potential. So out come a Gibson, a saxophone and a bass to reinforce the usual arsenal of rudimentary and not-so-rudimentary gadgets the Swedish musician is used to relying on, joined of course by her inseparable accordion and by her even more inseparable husband, who naturally showed up on percussion.

From the very first moments of Blood Donation, there's a noticeably cleaner sound and a far more accurate overall production. Mariam is completely free to move within this new world of hers. As a result, every performance comes across as flawless, visceral and theatrical when needed, calm and sinuous in the quieter moments. While her beloved Andreas's drums never flex their muscles, they sound far more graceful and less frantic. Sweet Mariam also reveals an unsuspected pop elegance. The textures are enriched with horns and backing vocals ("Dead Meat") without ever sinking the emotional pathos kept so high throughout the record. But "Blood Donation" is above all a well-articulated succession of light and shadow, a work balanced in its intense and varied flow. If any confirmation of Wallentin's individual potential was needed, Blood Donation delivers it more than once.

But it's with Rhythm, the fourth album under the Wildbirds & Peacedrums name, that the two fully reignite their spirits. A return to origins in which the essentiality of the beat overwhelms the entire harmonic structure, sustained only by Wallentin in the guise of a wild muse, somehow wounded by the banality of everyday life.

The album's title fully explains what's musically contained within it. While on Rivers the two had given priority to academic impulses of an obviously classical bent, enlisting the Schola Cantorum of Reykjavík choir, here the material is decidedly rawer, with the beat taking on absolute centrality. Gone, then, are the instrumental and vocal expansions. Just the odd bassline here and there steps in to back up the dominant voice-and-percussion pairing. It's a return to origins, but with a new awareness, and a restlessness of spirit that bursts punctually through on every track via a drumming that never lets up.

Opening the dance is the exotic mantra of "Ghosts & Pains". Mariam warms up her voice, scattering irreverence with a thoroughly blues-inflected attitude. In the following "The Offbeat", the vocal cords are electrified and duly doubled, with Andreas busy keeping the rhythm section in check through his usual scraps of circumstance. "Gold Digger" appears warmer and more measured instead, even as its closing turmoil highlights the dark mood that characterizes the album.

"Mind Blues", by contrast, is a syncopated dance, with the two almost seeming to chase each other through little choruses and sudden rhythmic tricks. Indeed, throughout the record an energetic drive toward pure, hard dominance reigns unchallenged. It's as if the two lovers had decided to unload their own anxieties through their individual instrumental roles, in a sonic embrace that offers no respite and more than once takes your breath away.

While not really reinvigorating the distinctive traits already fully showcased on the first two records, Rhythm gives us a duo in dazzling form, as shown by the powerful crescendo of "The Unreal Vs. The Real" or the irresistible lead single "Keep Some Hope", enveloping and rhythmically hypnotic. Special mention goes to the closing "Everything All The Time", set on more experimental and cacophonous terrain, with Wallentin in fast-forward mode and Werliin caught up in a genuine inner delirium. Sudden tempo changes and rising intensity simply underscore its total stylistic elusiveness.

P.S. Heartcore was released for the Swedish market only in 2007, and distributed in Europe in 2008.

The Snake was released for the Swedish market only in 2008, and distributed in Europe in 2009.

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