Algiz speeds through a welter of French - and how deep are the roots of the concept of time in folk music?  Flute, guitar; sudden swelter of bongos. The music moves swiftly - to what end?  I mean that literally.  Backworld
effuse through violins about "The Devil's Plaything."  Are folk music and semiotexte two tribes never destined to meet?  Are there inroads in folk music, yet to be explored?  Or, are those inroads in ruins?  Der Blutharsch
rain drums and tubular bells upon the earth that excoriates titles.  Bryin Dall states that he is so lonely he could cry, stretching out the fingers of this mood through guitar and strings.  Cyclobe curve through the strings
and drums bursting into a ringing of telephone and scuttled voices cutting through the first five minutes after sleep.  Darkwood intone over guitars (whither goeth the number of strings?) and German, as if something is
indeed waiting in that dark wood - waiting from behind. Dawn & Dusk Entwined unfurl voices and melding tones and those voices build - point, counterpoint?  Is there a chance to build something over hours and
months and years - is this the legacy of folk music:  the gradual build? Leutha take their focus - "Wind" - and breathe through it, into it, around it - or do they mean "Wind"?  There is no small amount of crossings and
movement in the sounds - bellsbecome air and air moves through cylindres. It trembles into the final seconds, vanishing as nature becomes time. Nobody's voice rings clear as the bells that succeed it - fractured blossoms of feedback warble from the sound-sources - and it is not for nothing that the concept of "longing" is the capstone to the arch of folk music.  Novy Svet rend the proceedings with rude organ and la la lowing - playing while this Rome burns, like one of the twelve Caesars - "La Aroma Lola"? ?  A hey hey, a hey hey. Ozymandias.  Look for the coming inter view in which it is revealed that his favourite poem is not, in fact, "Ozymandias".  Piano emerges, and slyphs out as gently as it had come.  Pantaleimon study the strings of their guitar as through a pastoral life, as though a pastoral life. There is a sound behind them that suggests someplace in the country where someone
let fall an arrow.  The string section bows for an extended period of time. Much unexpectation.  Regard Extreme bring drums and synthetics to trump l'oeil for the joy of the princess.  And so it goes.  Skald offer their
respect to days gone by, with plucking and bowing, plucking and bowing.  It is surprising how many of these sounds are intensely visual, telling stories left and right and down again.  ...The Soil Bleeds Black feature
flute and big bass drum.  Would the compact disc format doom the musicians herein to a drowning or a burning at the stake were they transported back to a simpler time?  Tor Lundvall, in "My Weakness", calls from a fog - a
veil of bells and wails, a mist of sounds not missed; of vice and ether/or - regret? Nostalghia?

David Cotner
(Vital Weekly)

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