Appel Rekords
Soetkin Collier : Reiseiland (B,2012)****/***°
On this new album by Soetkin Collier, she founded her inspirations on a journey to Faro, an island north of Gotland, Sweden (where film maker Ingmar Bergman used to live and work), a remote and deserted area with lots of lakes. (The name Faro itself can be translated as journey-island, the title of this album, due to the effort you must take to get there : also for Soetkin the journey itself was already an undertaking).
The songs that came forth from this have roots in melancholy and loneliness, with a slight touch of homesickness, partly fall back on a couple of folk roots traditions and memories, taking elements of a few Swedish folk songs, but reinterpreting them in a contemporary context, adapting a bossa nova rhythm as a warmer melancholic groove, reinterpreting a Sephardic song and even one Indian song, Also interpreted is one song by the Lebanese Rahbani Brothers (who were composers for the famous Middle Eastern singer Fairuz), all translated carefully into Dutch lyrics and new, fitting within this new context arrangements. Somewhere Soetkin looks for a balance in a lot of elements. Melancholy and sadness is present but never dominating. Loneliness can work as a relief, which the Swedish landscape gives. The memories of old traditions can easily make the mind linger back into a rocking-the-cradle repetitions, while with creative combinations it not only reforms itself into a new song, it inherits new life based upon memory and momentary vision and the hope to carry the best qualities of it further.
Tom Theuns like always succeeds to change his guitar style with each song. The accordion by Sophie Cavez is a waltzing and melancholic and sometimes texturing part. More subtle and in the background are Didier Francois nyckelharpa, and the appearances of Dajo De Cauter’s double bass and Stefan Timmermans’ bagpipes. Besides this are even more subtle production textures by guitar, voice and perhaps even a bit of keyboards even though this is not mentioned.
