Jon Collin: Bridge Variations review – Stockholm soundscapes with nyckelharpa

Tapes of busy roads and dripping water mingle with the sound of the traditional Swedish instrument in this experimental folk album

The Swedish city of Stockholm is spread across 14 islands. The wider Stockholm archipelago is made up of many more – something like 30,000. Islands mean bridges, and bridges mean echoes. It’s underneath some of these that Jon Collin recorded the pieces on Bridge Variations, on his secondhand homemade nyckelharpa – a traditional Swedish instrument with keys that is a hybrid of sorts between a hurdy-gurdy and a fiddle.

Jon Collin: Bridge Variations album cover

Collin draws inspiration from Jonas Mekas’s film Travel Songs, made from two decades of footage shot on the fly around Europe. Like Mekas’s film, this album is also itinerant, capturing Collin’s recordings of private happenings. Tape playback layers the nyckelharpa, magnifying the acoustic properties of these spaces. (“Some parts were recorded to tape in one location and then played back and re-recorded elsewhere,” he explains, “to bounce the recordings around the city in time and space.”) In The Singing Arch there are reflective moments and occasional melancholic turns; elsewhere, he plucks the instrument so it settles into the wider soundscape of busy roads and dripping water. Sonny is a bundle of banjo-like playing, and the highlight is the propulsive repeated melody on Black Licorice that is lifted ecstatically skyward by a bed of low-end sound.

Collin lives in Stockholm and runs the label Early Music. Bridge Variations solidifies connections between his Stockholm activities and Gothenburg label and shop Discreet, which release the album and are the hub for a thriving lo-fi underground and experimental folk scene in Sweden, putting out tapes, CD-Rs and vinyl featuring grotty roadside sessions, collaged field recordings, church organs, intimate songwriting and medieval concept albums. In recent years it’s become a vibrant (if often lyrically dour) scene of people making, playing and experimenting freely, with little in the way of PR. Case in point: this album is probably out now, although it may be earlier or later – it depends when someone gets around to putting it online.

Also out this month

Afar songwriter Yanna Momina’s Afar Songs (Glitterbeat) was recorded in one evening in her stilted hut on the horn of Africa. Her voice is powerful and dagger-sharp, rippled and ridged with vibrato. The best tracks are those with scant accompaniment such as the calabash and handclaps in opener Every One Knows I Have Taken a Younger Lover. The tide came in while recording, adding the happily audible hush of water. Elsewhere, Skye smallpiper Brìghde Chaimbeul collaborates with Scottish traditional musician Ross Ainslie and drummer Steven Byrnes Haberlin on LAS (Great White), expanding traditional styles into whirling mandalas of pipes, and Irish singer Junior Brother doles out wry songs of anxiety and frustration on The Great Irish Famine (Strange Brew).