LUUP - Meadow Rituals

Fans of Comus, Espers, and the most elegant, "haunted" folk: here's an album you can't afford to miss.

Eight tracks offering a fresh and captivating take on progressive-folk, the brainchild of Greek flautist Stelios Romaliadis.

No fewer than nineteen musicians took part in the project: among them David Jackson of Van Der Graaf Generator, alongside several European artists well established in the neofolk and art-rock scenes (collaborators of Current 93, James Blackshaw, Nurse With Wound, Laetitia Sadier, and Robert Wyatt are all on board).

The songs draw their main inspiration from European folk traditions, particularly Celtic and Balkan. Even the instrumentation sets the album apart from more orthodox reinterpretations: chamber-like in style and almost entirely free of rock elements, it brings to mind projects like Univers Zero and L'orchestre noir, the most "modern classical" wing of prog and neofolk.

But the album isn't simply a straightforward "average" of the two genres either. The key to its appeal lies in the unresolved tension between their respective elements — intricate interplay and grace on one side, starkness and unease on the other.

I'll try to show how the record's singular atmosphere arises precisely from these contrasts.

Structures, between balance and precariousness

An important element lies on the rhythmic level: the tracks are slow-moving flows, almost entirely devoid of percussion, yet the odd time signatures of Balkan tradition still surface in the melodies and counterpoints. Beneath the apparent calm, then, the pieces conceal a strong dynamic character, one that only rarely takes over and becomes explicit. In most cases, the asymmetry of the rhythms instead works subliminally: it undermines the balance of the pieces and casts sinister shadows and omens over them.

The harmonies marry sophistication with essentiality, drawing on ancient schemes; the modal one in particular, in which any note of the scale can take on the role of harmonic centre (in tonal music, more familiar to us, only two notes are allowed that privilege).

The interplay between disorientation and relief that the musicians build on this choice is masterful. The melodic lines are granted a kind of supervised freedom: they can drift around the fundamental note, but are forced to return to it as soon as they stray too far. Just when they best manage to blend in with ordinary tonal melodies, then, they snap back to their "anomalous" harmonic centre, creating a strong sense of disorientation.

But also a feeling of reconciliation and "homecoming": after all, the fundamental note is the pole star guiding all the melodic wanderings of the instruments, and the listener always carries an unconscious desire for every line to converge back on it.

Drone, repetition, suspension

A device as old as music itself anchors the melodic flows to the pivotal note: the drone, the constant presence of the note in the background. Flutes and cellos repeat it with minimal, circular variations – very brief melodic sequences that begin and end on the fundamental.

The drones' task is to keep alive the memory of the one note that matters: they are the vestals of the harmonic centre, the keepers of the listener's sense of orientation. Like the stars of the Great Bear, they dance around their Pole Star along an extremely tight orbit.

The music of "Meadow Rituals" is indeed "concentric", made of variations that last exactly as long as one full circuit around the centre. For the foreground instruments this can mean a long stretch, while for the drones it's a matter of mere seconds, but neither has any room to evolve: both are trapped in a limbo of stasis and cyclicality.

The atmosphere of suspension arises from the meeting of rhythmic instability and melodic circularity. While the former puts the listener on guard and builds anticipation for an upheaval that never arrives, the latter prolongs this state of alert ad libitum, turning it into a single, endless, timeless instant.

Magic, silence and nature

There is also an arcane aura, somewhere between the esoteric and the enchanted, that permeates the entire record. This is tied to the overall sense of stagnation, but also to the extreme dilation of the sound and the "ancient" soul of the musical material.

The voices are ethereal, half-whispered. Rarely are more than three instruments heard together, and the notes are faint, scattered drops of sound: it feels like witnessing silence itself, and the magic that pervades it, set to music.

A skilful use of electronic effects pushes this rarefaction even further. By enhancing guitar harmonics, the rustle of strings or the breathing of wind players, it conjures up a forest of non-notes that fill the void and render the real notes almost unnecessary.

Echoes and crackles punctuating the silence: a nighttime forest, the very same setting evoked by the most strictly folk soul of the tracks. Nature is indeed a fundamental component of this music – suggested also by the titles ("Cream Spiraling", "Roots Growth", "Northern Lights") and, above all, by the very brief lyrics of "See You in Me": "You are the river, and the mountains/ You are the sky, and the sea".

From these words – and the way they're murmured, repeated as if in a ritual – emerges a personified, magical vision of the natural world. The cyclical nature of the music and the precarious balance of its dynamics thus find a new key to interpretation: they represent, with all its mysteries, the ambiguous bond between man and nature.

Music Rediscovered

It almost seems as though every musical element that makes the album so distinctive was somehow already written into its relationship with nature, ultimately a logical outgrowth of those traditional structures that have always served as its sonic transposition.

This is obviously true of the modal element, the foundational scheme of European traditional music. But the drone element too, on closer inspection, can be sensed in many English songs. As can the "hidden asymmetry" of the rhythms, common for instance in dances from the Breton area.

So what does "Meadow Rituals" do? By innovating, it uncovers what has always been there without being noticed. It brings to light the musical subconscious of European folklore. It does so in a way that is original, evocative, refined.

It's the most surprising album I've heard this year.

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04/06/2011