JOOST LIJBAART / SANNE RAMBAGS / BRAM STADHOUDERS - Trinity
Challenge Records: CR73471
Joost Lijbaart: drums; Bram Stadhouders: guitar; Sanne Rambags: vocals
Improvised atmospheric guitar and kinetic drumming that rise and fall like breathing, and over this the plaintive singing of Rambags. As on her previous recordings, she shifts easily from Sami to English to other languages and wordless chanting that slides up and down the register. Lijbaart’s approach to drumming is to use the entirety of the small kit at his disposal with great subtlety and ingenuity, picking up a driving pace when need but equally content to create scales and arpeggios from the tones of the different drums, cymbals and various clicking and clacking instruments. This gives the set a feel that drifts into New Age / Ambient spaces, particularly with the bird songs on ‘Wild’, track 8, particularly with the resonant treble of the guitar lines. But the drumming also helps ground the music somewhere between folk and jazz, particularly on the longest track, ‘The dance of life’, track 7, which mixes lyrics that feel as if they are from traditional folk-songs with shifts in tempo and direction that has the feel of a suite in its structure. Here, Rambags singing and vocalising constantly shifts emotional centre from hope to mourning to despair, with Stadhouders acoustic guitar working around these moods and the subtle percussion creating a perfectly judged running commentary. The piece (as do the others) capture the sense of live improvisation, in that there are twists and turns that surprise and delight the listener and which the other musicians work hard to follow, but there is also the sense that the familiarity of the trio allows them to take lots of risk in order to find lots of rewards in the ways in which the music develops.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
Challenge Records: CR73471
Joost Lijbaart: drums; Bram Stadhouders: guitar; Sanne Rambags: vocals
Improvised atmospheric guitar and kinetic drumming that rise and fall like breathing, and over this the plaintive singing of Rambags. As on her previous recordings, she shifts easily from Sami to English to other languages and wordless chanting that slides up and down the register. Lijbaart’s approach to drumming is to use the entirety of the small kit at his disposal with great subtlety and ingenuity, picking up a driving pace when need but equally content to create scales and arpeggios from the tones of the different drums, cymbals and various clicking and clacking instruments. This gives the set a feel that drifts into New Age / Ambient spaces, particularly with the bird songs on ‘Wild’, track 8, particularly with the resonant treble of the guitar lines. But the drumming also helps ground the music somewhere between folk and jazz, particularly on the longest track, ‘The dance of life’, track 7, which mixes lyrics that feel as if they are from traditional folk-songs with shifts in tempo and direction that has the feel of a suite in its structure. Here, Rambags singing and vocalising constantly shifts emotional centre from hope to mourning to despair, with Stadhouders acoustic guitar working around these moods and the subtle percussion creating a perfectly judged running commentary. The piece (as do the others) capture the sense of live improvisation, in that there are twists and turns that surprise and delight the listener and which the other musicians work hard to follow, but there is also the sense that the familiarity of the trio allows them to take lots of risk in order to find lots of rewards in the ways in which the music develops.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
