Glimmer - Sturla Eide, Andreas Aase

A careful foot stomp in a slightly tilted 3, the firm but lyrical double-stops of a traditional Norwegian fiddler, fingertips touching guitar strings to create chords and rhythms ... All of this floating freely in the beautiful acoustic space of an old church: This is the musical sphere created by Sturla Eide Sundli and Andreas Aase.

The core of the tune - As the notes from Sturla’s fiddle and Andreas’ guitar soar towards the ceiling of the Sofienberg church in Oslo, thoughts and emotions are unleashed. Every single melody in Norwegian traditional music is saturated by rhythm, simply because the tunes had to be danceable by themselves a long time ago – the melody is in the rhythm, the rhythm is in the melody. So when Andreas’ guitar and occasional bouzouki is added to Sturla’s fiddle and hardanger fiddle playing, it is done in a thoughtful and gentle way. Since these tunes work perfectly well on their own, they are merely adorned with the simplest of chord progressions and the most discreet pulse. Instead of imposing on the tunes a landslide of sounds and arrangements (which works just fine in other contexts), this is an attempt to combine tunes in new ways, so that by a gentle change of key or pulse we can make the melodies shed a clarifying light on each other.

We always ask ourselves: What does the tune need? What is expendable? Have we found the core of the tune? Through this calm and patient way of arranging our music, a different level of listening can be reached and the heart can fly into the world of traditional tunes. The process has just begun, and it is our humble ambition that some of our thoughts and the deep joy we feel in playing this stuff translates to the listener.

The music on this recording bridges a gap of 150 years, all the way from the crippled farmhand Elling Holstad, whose fiddling wizardry could be heard in the Orkladal region in the 1850s, through the legacy of Hallvard Ørsal who played in the Nordmøre region and in the U.S. in the early- to mid-20th century, we’ve included a set of tunes composed by the distinguished Røros fiddler and teacher Sven Nyhus, and two of the selections are composed by ourselves.

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