Traditional ancient ballads rubbing shoulders with contemporary sound – that’s the description of 'The Smoky Smirr o Rain', the third album from Scottish/Finnish duo Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola. As you'd expect, it has the Celtic vibe juxtaposed with Scandinavian style.
With ten years active touring together, the duo has honed and matured their sound through “telegraphic interplay, playful improvisation and timbral exploration” – their combined hallmark, which “dances across the whole spectrum of emotions from radiant joy to quiet despair, engaging both the body and mind of the listener”. That is precisely the right words to hit the spot.
Sarah-Jane Summers has a Masters degree in Norwegian Folk Music and Improvisation and has collaborated with the great and the good of Scandinavia in her original, unique and experimental style. Likewise, Juhani Silvola is a sought after guitarist, a respected composer, and producer of electro-acoustic contemporary music.
The opening track ‘Dàn Fhraoichis’ – sad, mellow, aching – is taken to a higher level by the spacious chords inspired by 1960s modal-jazz and Ethiopian music.
Spanning cultures, countries, and continents give this album a wide, expansive feel from jigs and reels to sounds that haven’t yet found a name or genre. It truly has the experimental vibe of the ancient, the modern, the old to the post-modern. For example, ‘Number 81’ is a fast-paced, swinging five-bar reel from the 1600s described as “Baroque techno”. It’s impossible to stand still with this in your ear. ‘Polskat (Rinda Nickola)’ is a set of Finnish tunes from the 1700s.
From the smoky, sad, mellow airs and melodies peculiar to the Scottish highlands and islands to the superstitions and emotions of long forgotten generations, somehow ‘The Smoky Smirr o Rain’ is a tribute to the old, the new, the borrowed, the blue.