That sort of thing – improvising, the pleasure of the sound – has a big place in the music of the variety of Baltic zithers, which basically consist of a soundbox of varying size and design with a varying number of strings from five upwards. In Finland it’s the various forms of kantele, in Lithuania kankles, in Latvia kokle, in western Russia gusli, and in Estonia kannel.

It is kannels that Estonian Eva Väljaots plays, a variety of them with different sounds, strings and using different techniques, and her album taps into the essence of that delight in sound. Conceptually this series of pieces, all her own compositions, relate to aspects, and neighboring plants, of the bullrush (great reed mace), whose stiff brown sausage shaped flower-mass, atop a tall swaying stem, fragments as it matures, into a blizzard of white down that floats off in even the gentlest breath of breeze. Her simple, rather Moomin-like, line drawings of it and other plants in the CD booklet illustrate each track.

The album opens with sparse, ringing harmonics, alternating with ripples of the more metallic plucked sound of the full-length strings (possibly phosphor-bronze ones on this particular kannel, judging by their sound; lower-tension, so deeper and slinkier than steel). Harmonics and open strings combine into a denser pattern, the melodic motifs moving to the higher, shorter strings as it progresses.

Then in “Hundinuiaõis - Bulrush Bloom,” it’s the short-sustained gutty sound of a kannel strung with, perhaps, carbon-fibre (used nowadays as a less breakable replacement for twisted horsehair. (Though it could be that - the pack could perhaps do with some information on the instruments.) For “Lend - Flight” the strings are of today’s most-used material, steel, and played using a different technique which combines strumming, damping and plucking. The sustain of the strings in “Ahtalehine - Narrowleaf” ring, blend and intermodulate. “Laialehine - Broadleaf” is energetic rhythmic strumming, alternating chords made by moving the damping fingers from one group of strings to another.

In “Tiivad - Wings” it’s a hiiu-kannel, a bowed kannel closely related to Finland’s jouhikko: the dry sound of horsehair strings (sometimes now carbon-fibre) bowed with a small horsehair bow, some strings being drones, one or more stopped, for the melody, with the back or front of the fingers. Väljaots adds her voice, in bird-call sounds, to its rhythmic rasping. “Laulev Puu - Singing Tree” combines hiiu-kannel with fast-strummed kannel.

This is an album that celebrates the sounds of kannels, by a listening player showing not what she can do – though she is indeed a skilful player and master of techniques – but what her instruments can do, and the images and thoughts their sounds evoke as they animate the silence.

Visit the artist online.

Photo: Monika Väliste