If you are into contemporary folk and ethno music from Scandinavia and northern Europe be sure to visit this site. It’s a nice little archive with video clips taken at various folk festivals in Sweden and around the Baltic Sea.
This site is supported by The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs and The Nordic Cultural Fund so there are NO ads, popups, banners or registration, just great music
To see Jonas Simonsson perform a “halling” on willow flute click on the Swedish flag and then the group name “Bäsk”. Hidden among all fiddle tunes you might find some rare contributions like east European bagpiping or Olga Shishkinas performance on Zither( The Uralish dance, Russia).
Just didn’t want you to miss out on this
Cheers!
/MarcusR
[ This Message was edited by: MR on 2002-09-27 09:02 ]
[ This Message was edited by: MR on 2002-09-28 01:29 ]
Some great Finnish tunes there as well. (Click the flag of Finland.) Check out Värttinä’s Äijö. It’s a modern tune tune still very deep in musical traditions of eastern Finland. The band has some Irish influence since the bozouki player of the band is also a great whistler. He sometimes can be seen in sessions around here.
Forgot about this post but just wanted to say that I stumbeled across Varttinas first album on a garage sale last weekend.
Great stuff and some good whistling. Doing my best to learn Tuskovin polska. Would like to use it as a break in a set of jigs.
Quite an extensive site. Some of the music brings back memories of the Halsing Lodge Christmas parties that my grandmother took me to when I was a kid.
Varttina (excuse missing accents) are a knockout. More estrogen in one of their songs than in a whole Corrs concert. There are a lot of very good Finnish groups and artists.
If you are a fan of Altan or Sharon Shannon, click on the Swedish flag and see Swap (there’s a circle over the “a”). Even though there are no whistles, there are a couple of good reels and a good slip-jig (or Polska).
I’ve been checking out this site a bit, good stuff. Here’s some tunes with penny whistle from the band Markamot, looks like the guy is playing a Sweetone or Meg!
My favourites from that site (so far) are Bask- particularly the Vals fran Munkadel, Frifot-the set that starts with Ale Moller playing the cow horn (Agram). I really like his bass-drone mandola playing. He’s made a great record with Aly Bain too. The other one is Josephine’s Waltz by Vasen. It’s a beautiful tune by Roger Tallroth, the guitar player. Dervish recorded that on an early album. Those are all in the Swedish section. Interesting baritone sax playing on the Bask cut.
Olga Shishkina playing the Russian Gusli is pretty amazing. She looks quite young, but her fingers can fly. All are good, but the tune “Barynia” really smokes:
And thanks BoneQuint for digging this up from the forgotten realms of the Chiffboard.
I know that the people behind tvfolk put in a lot of time and effort to provide a great and free on-line video archive for contemporary traditional music from northern Europe. It truly is a great site and they do deserve a lot of visitors.
These kinds of threads die pretty quickly and they are usually quite hard to dig up. If you don’t know that they exist, you don’t know what to search for either.
Maybe its time to start an on-line resources section to “Chiff Links”
I enjoyed Folknet too. That girl playing the zither thing intrigued me. Is she damping the strings she doesn’t want to sound?? That’s what it seemed like…
But the site is just further proof of the depth of diversity out there in Musicland, especially compared to the corporate effluent piped in to us via tv.
True. So, here’s another interesting whistle-related clip. Is that a recorder or a whistle? It has that somewhat “hooty” sound I associate with recorders, but a nice tune well played in any case:
Very true! I guess I’m having a mid life crisis or something similar as I just re-discovered public radio again, also end up listening to the same channels my father tortured us with during car trips when I was a kid.
