Album review: Thomas von Wachenfeldt – Den Vanfrejdade: Hultkläppens låtar och leverne for #MetalChronicles
Artist: Thomas von Wachenfeldt
Album: Den Vanfrejdade: Hultkläppens låtar och leverne
Label: Nordvis
Release date: October 25th, 2024
Country: Sweden
Format reviewed: CD Quality Digital Promo
Thomas von Wachenfeldt – Den Vanfrejdade: Hultkläppens låtar och leverne review by #Ask
The first raw tunes of “Sorglåt i G-moll” sends a shiver down my spine. Overtones and woody resonance cut right through my busy day, align mind and body in open anticipation of stories from past generations. To start the one hour and 22 minutes collection of fiddle tunes with a grieving song is a genius choice. It immediately shows the variety of expression in the fiddler style and the composition of Hultkläppen, awakens the ears of the listener to nuance, emotion and texture. So much pain and beauty in just one stroke of the bow, in an unexpected interval, a chord barely touched before the notes separate into each its lonely reverberation.
Thomas von Wachenfeldt is a Swedish violinist and guitarist who is known for his participation in the Swedish folk music scene as well as the metal scene. He is the founder of death metal bands Wachenfeldt and Wombbath, and has also made several guest appearances with bands of the metal scene such as Emtombed, Grave and Hulkoff, as well as acoustic and folk music based acts such as Forndom and Bards of Skadi.
Beside his career as musician, won Wachenfeldt is a PhD researcher and Associate Professor at Dalarna university and Uppsala University. In 2024 he released a book in Swedish called “Den Vanfrejdade: Hultkläppens låtar och leverne”. The book is based on his research in his capacity as PHD at Uppsala University, where he teaches courses in the history of metal music, among other subjects. It delves deep into the life and artistry of Hultkläppen, a well-known fiddler and folk music composer of Hälsingland, active during the second half of the 19th century. Hulkläppen tapped into an ancient heritage of songs and added his own touches to creations that are still widely known, loved and reproduced by amateurs and professionals all over Sweden, reimagined and reinterpreted for new audiences and new purposes in present day. Since the book is sold out this review will focus on the two cd’s accompanying the book, where von Wachenfeldt has recorded every known tune by Hultkläppen.
Right from the first note of the first song I know it will be perfect. It is the clarity of the tone, yet unpolished and raw, the clean simplicity of the folk tune intervals and the resonance of strings vibrating together in a silent room. In previous works von Wachenfeldt has taken great liberties with the old material, transformed it into modern creations with influence of classical music and other styles, but in the recording of Hultkläppens collected work he is a fiddler and nothing else. His playing style is straight forward and simple, with minimal vibrato and a steady rhythm intended to lead the audience to dance. His skill and classical training are evident only in the richness and sensitivity of tone, the clean double stops, the lack of mistakes and involuntary dissonance that are commonly occurring in in older recordings of the same songs, made by autodidact or informally trained fiddlers. Still, he has allowed the instrument its full range of fire. Overtones, rasps from the bow and some blue notes turn the listening experience to an adventure.
Von Wachenfeldt has gone for emotion and spirit all the way through. Every song has received ornamentations and accents that builds its capacity to convey joy and euphoria, power and strength, grief and loss. The spellbinding and mysterious pull of Hultkläppens långa D-mollpolska is enlarged by being played almost entirely over two strings, the ¾ rhythm heavily emphasised with the pressure of the bow, giving the illusion of several musicians casting a net around the audience, pulling them into an irresistible dance. In Hultkläppens vals a single tone with sparse decorations allows the melody to take centre stage in all its sensitive detail, while in the grieving songs the focus is on nuance and texture of slowly delivered notes. All songs are performed by von Wachenfeldt alone, with no backup and very little manipulation in the mixing process. It feels like being there with him, alone in a big empty room where he invokes the old spirits one by one until they are all dancing around him.
Any folk music trained Swedish violinist will recognize many of these songs as they are part of the repertoire of many “Spelmanslag” (a Swedish term for a specific type of folk music group based on region). Thus, I know that some of the songs can sound fairly boring and annoying when played in a less sensitive way, but in this collection there is not a boring moment. For example, Hultkläppens Brännvinspolska has been given a fiery quality by von Wachenfeldts emphasis on rhythm and power that compensates for the monotonous melody. This way he is staying true to the task of preserving heritage but at the same time elevates it with his own artistry.
An old argument about modern interpretations of folk music states that folk music always has a useful purpose, such as dance, work, soothing children, telling stories or building community by playing and singing together. When it is reinterpreted to the point of uselessness it is no longer folk music but has lost its essence. There is also the other side of this argument, stating that classical music is to be considered as art and therefore cannot be bound to any rules of usefulness, such as a rhythm suitable for dance. When von Wachenfeldt as a classically trained professional records the works of Hultkläppen he shows that it is possible to elevate the pure fiddler style into art without losing any part of its usefulness.
With his pure and straight forward playing style with ornamentation and harmony well known from fiddler tradition and only minimal presence of fancy techniques, he makes the listening experience captivating and pleasant enough for spoiled modern ears, but still useful to the purpose of dance, history teaching, preservation of heritage and by ear learning. By playing all the songs on only one violin he conveys the feeling of the one fiddler bringing the music to his audience, the sense of mystery and fire of the strings sounding like several musicians at times and like a very lonely violinist in a forest clearing the next. From the information about Hultkläppen, this would have been the experience of the audience of his time, as he was known for spellbinding playing styles and unusual harmonies. By choosing to play in this way, von Wachenfeldt makes Hultkläppen come alive through his own strings, giving justice to the depth of knowledge about Hultkläppen and his tunes meticulously gathered by the academic mind during decades of research. The tradition of learning music by ear, of feeling it and reimagining it, of finding new sounds in old instruments, bringing new emotion out of ancient tunes, breaking rules and following them in a mindset similar to the metal scene of today. In interviews von Wachenfeldt has called Hultkläppen more metal than metal. In this work he has proven this point.
The compilation ends with another grieving song, which is another genius choice. The sharp pain of the intervals, the few and slow decorations, the deliverance of the prolonged notes like suffocated wails of sorrow bring tears to my eyes. This closing of the compilation brings me to reflections of ancestors and tradition, how stories and emotions of past generations are brought to the next by small nuances in vibration, the shift in a finger, the lightness and angle of a right hand on a modern bow.
I wonder what part of the experience is in the original composition of Hultkläppen and what is created by the interpretation of von Wachenfeldt. As I pick up my own violin and play along the notation it sounds nothing like the recording. The basic melody and structure is there but the feeling is lost. The feeling needs to be felt by the fiddler and the techniques for creating those seemingly effortless sounds need to be learned by listening, told in many words and seen in person, the way one fiddler has taught a song to the next by playing it over and over, showing the fingers on the board and the movements of the bow. Many of the songs are named not only after Hultkläppen as creator and the style of the individual song, but also after the person who has taught it to von Wachenfeldt. This practice of naming the source of material that is not created from nothing but rather developed and improved out of older materials over time is common in the Swedish fiddler tradition. Thus we can assume that what is heard on the recordings are multilayered creations ranging from ancient fragments of heritage to Hultkläppens bending and moulding of it into something new for his time, to the generations of fiddlers having learned the songs by ear and improved them according their own liking and finally to von Wachenfeldt, adding his own skill, emotion and aesthetic preferences to the final outcome.
With this work von Wachenfeldt takes his place in a long line of fiddlers learning, improving and teaching variations of the Swedish fiddler heritage. To make the material even more available for aspiring fiddlers, some details about ornamentations, tunings, finger positions and bowing styles to use and avoid would be appreciated. Maybe even visual recordings of left and right hand to make the fine details seen that are difficult to guess only from hearing. Even though the folk tunes are brought to the future by being adopted in other styles, there is a deep value in preserving the skills of the old ways. 10/10
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10/10 Immortal Classic
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