Forndom – Moþir
Band: Forndom
Album title: Moþir
Label: Nordvis Produktion
Release date: December 6th, 2024
Country: Sweden
Format reviewed: High-Quality Digital Recording
The latest offering from Swedish act Forndom is a meditation of detail, depth and texture. Forndom has left the samples and synthezisers behind and invited several classically trained musicians to back up his slow, thoughtful folksongs in honour of the great mother in her various forms. The arrangement is careful and minimalistic. The same instruments return over and over, giving a feeling of cohesion, of a world surrounding the listener and the main vocalist.
Already in the first notes I am mesmerized. There is darkness and mystery in the opening song, with an intro where bowed strings show their capacity for acoustic chaos, followed by a repeated tremolo riff that could, if distorted, had formed the base of a black metal song. I see the wave pattern of the clean tremolo in my head, sliding slowly up and down in in a dark, empty room. I listen to the silence over and under it, the space between those rapid touches of bow on string. When the solo violin enters, I am lost. The lightness and colour of the tone, yet with a humble simplicity in the melody, lifts me over the clouds.
With the slow pace and few instruments, and the familiar structure of the melodies taken from folk music roots, this is a piece of music that feels humble despite the obvious virtuosity of at least some of the musicians. They don’t fill the space with their personalities, they don’t show off their skills. They just gently weave the story, giving each other space and time to let every tone evolve and live and echo out in a patient surrounding. It is like an act of worship, a meditation on the nature of sound in space.
To call this folk music might be a bit of a stretch. This is a group of classical musicians who took inspiration from fiddler tunes and folk songs and then made their own amazing creation out of it. In my imagination, Forndom handed the basic chords and song structures to the classical musicians and asked them to do something for the background, and they took it and ran, and left him so far behind he spends the whole album trying to catch up.
Here is the paradox of the beauty of the classical arrangements in Moþir. The layers of carefully played acoustic instruments invite a listening experience of deep immersion and extreme sensitivity to subtle nuances. This style of listening does not work in favour of the vocal style of Forndom. The voice of the main vocalist is polished enough to sound formal, clean and correct but not in any way near the exploration of nuance and depth of the other elements. While the session musicians are performing a meditation on sound in space, opening for a glimpse of the divine between the notes, the simple folk songs performed by the Forndom vocalist are there for the purpose of carrying the words, not to mesmerize with the notes themselves. I see him at the banquet in the hall of a medieval king, entertaining the aristocrats with ballads and poems. At the same time the session musicians are in the contemporary concert hall. Both styles are valid, they are just different and for me they don’t work together. When the storyteller vocalist enters the stage, his voice becomes a distraction, a disturbance from what for me is the real experience of this album.
When I lock my attention to the lyrics and try to hear the classical arrangement as background music, I get a grasp of what someone else, less prone to be hypnotized by the textures of sound, might experience. The stories told are thoughtful and meditative. I can hear that the lyrics and instrumentation are indeed telling the same story, but with different means. But as soon as I have this moment of understanding of what might have been the intended effect of the arrangement, a horn solo takes centre stage and hits me right in the gut. The warm, slow tunes of the horn are given vast space to grow, to flow over the musical landscape, and again I am taken away, ascending… and there the ballad singer comes back, telling a story that I would have seen all in my head if he had only left me to my own imagination, floating on these sounds.
The album continues like this, glimpses of the light beyond, a euphoric preview of bliss that cannot be captured and preserved, interrupted by annoying elements that break the spell. My favourite track is Rán. The slowly woven strands of melody of the strings forming an almost invisible braid together with the warm alto, entering almost in secret, melting together in slow alluring waves. Together they are forming a contemplative love story that needs to end but nobody wants to leave.
In Rán the percussion section makes its only unwelcome addition. A “klick-klock”, probably from cow bells but giving a misplaced artificial effect, is nagging its way all through the song, distracting from the amazing arrangement and performance. I would say something about the virtue of minimalism and restraint, but to be honest this whole album is a testimony to that, so clearly somebody found the cow bells more interesting than I do. If this album would be re-released with the only difference of muting the cow bells, I would buy a copy. That is how annoying they are. And how good this song is.
Having lamented the cow bells for half a page I have to state my appreciation of everything else done by the percussion. The arrangement is suggestive and restrained, as if every percussive sound has been deliberately shaped and carried forward as a gift to the other musicians. There are plenty of space between percussion activity, and when it enters it has a purpose. It creates a frame, drives a wave, emphasises a melody.
Much of Moþir is masterfully composed. If it is not co-created by the session musicians but all created by Forndom I see great things in the future and to be clear, I am in no way advocating samples and synthesisers for back up. On the contrary. Getting outshined by ones session musicians is a risk worth taking. There is also beauty and wisdom in the willingness to allow space for others, to lift their art despite the obvious risk of comparison. For listeners who can melt together the formal voice of the medieval bard with the sound meditation in the contemporary concert hall, which I suspect will be most listeners, this album might be one of those you go back to over and over during a lifetime. 8/10 by Ask
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