Benedicte Maurseth: Mirra & Human Nature: The Heat Warps
A hardanger fiddle player from the fjord-and-mountain-filled region of Norway, where the instrument comes from, Benedicte Maurseth explores traditional music, nature and landscape influenced by the idea of ecosophy, a philosophy of ecological harmony. From childhood, she studied under master hardanger fiddler Knut Hamre, exploring the tunes, styles and effects associated with her instrument: its sympathetic strings, funnelled under the fingerboard, are particularly hypnotic, vibrating in response to the notes resonating above, as they do on the sitar and sarangi.
A follow-up to Maurseth’s 2022 Nordic music prize-winning Hárr, Mirra is named after an old dialect word describing wild reindeer running together in a circling pattern. Norwegian folk’s rhythmic repetitions feed Maurseth’s intricate compositions (as do the influences of minimalism and Krautrock), but the contributions of her bandmates, and the rustling textures of animal sounds, are also key. The bass and electronics of Mats Eilertsen and the melodic percussion of Håkon Stene suggest honks and heavy steps, especially in the jangling title track and the ominous Jaktmarsj (Hunting March). The tremulous Kvitkrull (Reindeer Lichen) is influenced by 1978 Canadian film Sámi Herders, while Nysnø Over Reinlav (Fresh Snow Over Reindeer Moss) includes field recordings of 13 animals, including gyrfalcons, whimbrels and wolverines, alongside producer Morten Qvenild’s fluttering piano.
Throughout the album, Maurseth’s fiddle is bowed, plucked and droned, evoking winds and weathers of all strengths. Her tentative, edgy melody on Kalven Reiser Seg (The Calf Rises), conveying the early hours of a deer’s life, is also a highlight. Maurseth recently said she has only seen wild reindeer twice in her life, despite living near them, once in herds of hundreds when she was seven. The possibility of fleeting magic, both instrumental and animal, is her album’s sparkling backbone.
By Jude Rodgers, The Guardian
Modern Nature’s songs exist within a sunny fog, all soft contours and elliptical inference. Wistful choruses drift by, occasionally bolstered by shadowy CSNY-style harmonies, as phrases emerge and recede, widely separated by pauses. It’s all very languid and impressionistic on the surface, but carefully structured underneath. The crisp minimalism of drum and bass pushes forward but quietly, like a krautrock rhythm section swathed in batting. Two guitars play at each other with lucid precision, not in sync, not even really in conversation, but approaching the same problem from different directions.
The Heat Warps is Jack Cooper’s sixth album as Modern Nature, following stints in similarly serene but prickly outfits Ultimate Painting and Mazes. The project has mutated considerably over time, incorporating free jazz musicians and writers of experimental prose into its later albums, but retaining a core ensemble of Cooper, Jim Wallis on drums and Jeff Tobias (of Sunwatchers) on bass. This time, however, Modern Nature adds a fourth member, the guitarist and improviser Tara Cunningham, best known for her work in Red Snapper.
You can hear Cooper and Cunningham finding a way to work together on opening cut “Pharoah,” one of the tracks that drives the hardest and most emphatically on clacks of woodblock, thrusts of snare, and booms of bass sound. The guitars scribble in the margins, lobbing clots of syncopated notes at one another over the beat, then listening, thinking, and responding in kind. The instrumental sound is knotty and challenging, but it’s laid over with a soothing vocal drone. Cooper’s torn, frayed murmur picks up charcoal-smudged harmonies here, a folk sound tinged with jazzy experimentation.
“Alpenglow” is the clear highlight, with gemlike guitar tones glittering over its fuzzy, insistent propulsion. The song is on the move, clearly, but also utterly calming, spare and architectural, but embellished, suddenly, with lavish harmonies. Sings Cooper, “Finally making some sense of it all/ Finally everything starting to fall/ Into a pattern that infinite factors break out in fear.” And in a way, that’s Modern Nature—a band that creates patterns out of complex fractal parts and limpid beauty out of multiplicity.
Jennifer Kelly, Bandcamp
p.s. Inspirations for MODERN NATURE: h e r e !