Even before you start playing the album, the cover is guaranteed to grab attention: a woman walking across a field, her head replaced by a bunch of flowers. So far, so surrealist for Danish multi-instrumentalist and composer Flach. In recent years she’s built quite a reputation on fiddle, Hardanger fiddle and nyckelhapa, playing variously with Mynsterland, Tailcoat, and the relentlessly questing Penny Pascal. While Skyklokke, her solo debut, stretches few boundaries, her compositions are melodic and eminently satisfying, ready to trip the light fantastic, as she shows on the opener, “Flickflach,” a showcase for her fluent playing.
“The Final Goodbye” brings a beautiful, formal delicacy with its sweet intricacy, while “ForGlemMigEj” is sombre, darker and slower, finding its beauty down among shadows. “Bishop On The Loose/The Endgame” flies headlong across the floor, relentless and gleeful. It’s all wonderful and accomplished, but the strangeness hinted at by the cover only really appears on the last track, “Skyggemaleren,” which has a delicious amorphous shape before falling back to silence. Stay tuned, though, because music returns, tentative and quietly playful. An ideal way to end. Flach has already shown her talents as an instrumentalist. Now she shines as a composer, too.
|
