Review on "Pastern" in fRoots - magazine

Got this amazing review in the latest issue of fRoots magazine, (http://www.frootsmag.com/)

MATS EDÉN

Pastern Gammalthea SEWJN 17

Mats Edén is, and has been since the 1970s, an absolutely key figure in the energy and evolution of Sweden’s folk music. The core and main composer of Groupa, collaborator with many other leading musicians, and to be found at the heart of the most intense buskspel clusters of musicians at spel- mansstämmor, the new music flows out of him as he deeply explores, masters and revels in the stretched relationship between rhyth- mic pulse and melody in Swedish and Norwe- gian dance music.

On Pastern he rounds up 26 tunes from throughout his life, about half of them his own, the rest traditional, some learnt from 1910-20 recordings. He plays them on solo fid- dle, viola d’amore, viola, hardanger fiddle or one-row melodeon, occasionally tracking his own duet part, and, if you let the CD run on after the last track, a burst of mad diddling.

Simple, it might seem, but there’s so much going on within the music rhythmically and in double-stopping. There’s a rich seam here for any fiddler, and any classically-edu- cated violinist who reckons they know it all should hear the stuff on this CD, listened to perhaps back-to-back with Bach’s and Bartók’s solo violin pieces.

www.matseden.se

Andrew Cronshaw