Artist: Lars Hollmer Genre(s):
Rock
Folk
Avantgarde
Discography:
XII Sibiriska Cyklar and Vill du Hora Mer Year: 2007
Tracks: 13
Utsikter Year: 2001
Tracks: 17
Andetag Year: 1997
Tracks: 16
Vendeltid Year: 1987
Tracks: 14
Tonoga Year: 1985
Tracks: 15
Fran Natt Idag Year: 1983
Tracks: 16
Vill Du Hora Mer Year: 1982
Tracks: 15
In the old age since Lars Hollmer first got together with his friends to play music in late-'60s Sweden, it seems improbable that his primary goal has been tilt stardom. For one thing, there is his pick of instruments, with the piano accordion looming large among them. Although certain accordionists possess all over the age acquired a flower child seal, from the internationally acclaimed nuevo tango master Astor Piazzolla through famed but lesser-known squeezeboxers like New York City denizens Guy Klucevsek (a Hollmer confederate in Accordion Tribe) and Andrea Parkins, the squeeze box believably suffers from the tarriance images of Lawrence Welk polka schtik, provoking snickers from the narrow wHO remain clueless about how forward-thinking, and indeed radical and radical, piano accordion music tin be.
Second, Hollmer is most nearly identified with a melodic style that suffers from nearly universal hoots of derision -- progressive careen -- although to claim he fits comfortably in a number of acts such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, and King Crimson would sure bespeak a misapprehension nearly the nature of his prowess. For if in that location is one quality that Lars Hollmer's music lacks, it would be largeness, a assay-mark of reformist rock in large persona responsible for the style's critical drubbing. Still, if you must shoes Hollmer in a box, it appears that for almost citizenry reformist rock will do, and that mightiness lead some to brush off him out of hand, without tied gift him a listen.
And finally, there is the very heat, familiarity, and even innocence of Hollmer's music, which gives avant-gardists of the omniscient variety a reason to turn a deaf ear. For although he makes music that lavatory be harsh and fifty-fifty a bit disturbed at times, with pugnacious textures, quirky instrumentation, and odd time signatures, Hollmer's compositions tin can besides be tuneful and accessible, sometimes tricky, and ofttimes disarmingly lovely. These are non the qualities many avant-gardists look for as indicators of forward-thinking music. One more come across against him.
Something that seems to be working in his favour, however, is perseverence, although that parole has a connotation of toil and struggle totally inappropriate in Hollmer's case. Rather, as the decades run, he seems to be enjoying himself besides often to stop, and although that aforementioned stone stardom is likely to stay elusive, Hollmer seems to have garnered sufficiency in the way of world-wide cult position to regain musical collaborators -- and aegir although comparatively little audiences -- from Quebec to Japan. He has even been known to make a rare raid into the U.S.A. -- a hotbed of vanguard prog rock piano accordion music if in that location of all time was one -- and find himself faced with unexampled post-concert fans scrambling to buy up all the KRAX-label CDs he's brought with him from the Chickenhouse.
The Chickenhouse, by the way, is the emplacement where near of Lars Hollmer's recorded music has been made, either through the thaumaturgy of overdubbing many Hollmers on a wide array of instruments or by Lars and friends, beginning with his '70s compatriots in Swedish avant-prog and far-out jazz-rock optical fusion, Samla Mammas Manna and their offshoots such as Zamla Mammaz Manna and Von Zamla. Located outside of Uppsala, Sweden, the Chickenhouse is a transcription studio apartment -- and too Hollmer's menage -- where the first incarnation of the Samlas assembled in 1969-1970 to disk the band's initial, eponymous album. The ring was a trio at that point, featuring Hollmer on keyboards along with bassist Lars Krantz and drummer Hans Bruniusson. Although it might have been difficult to envision in those early days, Hollmer, Krantz, and Bruniusson would find themselves back at a rebuilt Chickenhouse studio near 30 days afterwards, recording a brand-new Samlas CD,
Kaka (form your own conclusions some the rubric), along with guitarist Coste Apetrea. Compared to the other three bandmembers, one power call in Apetrea a congener neophyte to the crimp, although the operative word would be "relative," since Apetrea first joined the group in 1972.
Throughout the 1970s, Hollmer was topper known for his work under the Samla/Zamla umbrella, in groupings that featured him in a prominent part as co-composer and strongly fusion-oriented electric keyboardist, merely non "leader" per se. The music miscellaneous prog and jazz-rock elements with stylistic groundless card game ranging from kooky nonsense vocals to atmospherical liberate improvisation, an adventurous enough combining for the chemical group (after undergoing a name change to Zamla Mammaz Manna and adding guitar player Eino Haapala as a surrogate for the temporarily departing Apetrea) to join an collection of European avant-prog bands -- including Henry Cow, Univers Zero, and Etron Fou Leloublan -- under the Rock in Opposition umbrella. Given that Samla/Zamla LPs (on the Silence pronounce) were principally usable in the United States through specialized mail order outfits like Wayside Music (world Wide Web.waysidemusic.com, still a good source for Hollmer recordings), most stateside listeners first heard Hollmer and other Zamla members through their affair in Fred Frith's
Soberness album (released in the States on Ralph Records), half of which was recorded at the Chickenhouse in August 1979. The album miscellaneous the Henry Cow guitarist's skewed sonic explorations with a discrete European folk dancing feel, to which Hollmer and company were authoritative contributors.
From March to June 1980, the Zamlas recorded and released
Familjesprickor (aka
Syndicate Cracks), which was according to the liner notes "made during a period of transition," in the lead to music "which is not as optimistic and happy as it used to be." As it off out, this would be the concluding Zamlas appearance on record until
Kaka was released in 1998 (the band re-formed in the early '90s only it took until 1998 for the grounds to plow up on saucer). In the early '80s Hollmer would plow his attention toward Von Zamla and to his own solo efforts, which would reveal steady artistic growth.
With the cracks in the Zamla family unit finally prima to the group's dissolution, Hollmer and Haapala (maybe becoming a Lennon & McCartney or Becker & Fagen of Swedish avant-prog) coupled with two members of eccentric person French avant-popster Albert Marcoeur's ring to manikin the Von Zamla quartette and cover waving the flag of folk-flavored instrumental experimental and avant-prog rock (with possibly a bit of fusion and neoclassicism thrown into the mix for variety's sake). In 1982 the first Von Zamla album,
Zamlaranamma, was released, and the group soon expanded to a sise lineup, touring Europe and transcription a second gear album,
No Make Up!, at the Chickenhouse in May and August 1983. As of the mid-2000s, the most wide distributed papers of Von Zamla is the live CD entitled
1983, recorded alive in Bremen and released by Cuneiform in 1999. As Hollmer says in his enthusiastic liner notes, the band toured by omnibus and played a vast array of instruments, including various keyboards, guitar, bass, accordion, melodica, drums, orchestral bells, bassoon, hautbois, English horn, and band modulator, not to mention such percussive devices as "homemade plate," "metal pin-filled cans," and "bottles of different kinds."
And although he notes that Von Zamla "had TREMENDOUS FUN!!," Hollmer was at this time commencement to sincerely asseverate himself through his solo efforts asunder from the band, kickoff with 1981's
12 Sibiriska Cyklar, which he had recorded altogether solo at the Chickenhouse in June and October of 1980 and March of 1981.
Vill du Hora Mer, the showtime vent on Hollmer's KRAX label, followed in 1982; then came
Från Natt Idag in 1983 and
Tonöga in 1985. Hollmer sang and played near all the instruments on these albums (all recorded at the Chickenhouse), which ranged from strong and familiar folk-flavored songs to godforsaken yet melodious and focused subservient compositions that defied categorisation. Meanwhile, Von Zamla stone-broke up in flow of 1984, briefly re-forming with an altered lineup in 1985 before splitting up for upright.
As it off out, however, 1985 was an important year for Hollmer, marking the formation of his first group as a loss leader, the Looping Home Orchestra. The LHO toured Europe in 1986 and 1987, during those days as well recording the fifth KRAX-label album,
Vendeltid, at the Chickenhouse with a five-man card.
Vendeltid was a high water line for Hollmer, retaining all the charm, melodiousness, and imaginative rhythms of his earlier solo efforts (non to reference his solve with the Samlas) with music of sometimes haunting and aery lulu, with tones somewhere 'tween the lightness of Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the darkness of Univers Zero. Selections from the five-spot solo Hollmer releases of the eighties, including
Vendeltid, were later compiled onto the 1993 single-CD set entitled
Lars Hollmer 80-88 (later reissued as
The Siberian Circus), and well illustrate his artistic increment during the ten. In the disc's liners, Fred Frith far-famed the futility of assignment stylistic descriptors to Hollmer, indicating that, like all great composers, Hollmer's work touches the auditor at a deeper degree.
"Like Astor Piazzolla, Lars Hollmer is a severe composer working in a popular traditional language and one wHO defines his own price," Frith wrote. "Sometimes Lasse's frenzied skittishness and infectious enthusiasm pay way to the nigh smooth-spoken formula of our implicit in forlornness that I know of," Frith continued. "This is no small gift."
It is in Hollmer's compositions at this time that i begins to hear the echo of classical works of a wizardly humour -- Saint-Saëns' Aquarium from Le Carnaval stilboestrol Animaux for model -- but with a countrified quality entirely abstracted from the concert granville Stanley Hall, as if the (in his event Hungarian) folks themes Bartók discovered and secondhand in his compositions had been wrested aside from the graeco-Roman setting and returned to their earthier points of ancestry, piece likewise somehow maintaining a present-day feel. And yet Hollmer's music was not only a facile appropriation of folk themes to rock music in the manner that proggers "rocked the classics" -- his music kept up an legitimacy, originality, and depth of feeling that the far more than unglamorous rock bands rarely even hinted at.
In 1988 the original LHO played its last concert, but new incarnations of the radical would follow, and Hollmer would proceed to pen newfangled compositions for the tout ensemble. In 1992 the fourth version of the group consisted of Hollmer, Haapala, Krantz, and Frith along with keyboardist/percussionist Olle Sundin and Montreal multi-instrumentalist Jean Derome; this band performed at the 1992 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Quebec and and then toured Europe in 1993; selections recorded at FIMAV and on the European circuit were released on
Door Floor Something Window: Live 1992-1993 on the Victo mark in 1994. In many ways, the recording delineate a culmination of Hollmer's work as a solo artist to date, with dynamic and igneous live performances and off-kilter sonic touches wedded inseparably to the composer's redolent melodies and overarching compositional sense -- only thither would be far more to issue forth. By 1996 Hollmer would be a member of Accordion Tribe, an outside quintette of accordionists including Guy Klucevsek, Maria Kalaniemi, Bratko Bibic, and Otto Lechner; the grouping would concertise widely in Europe and Canada and release 2 acclaimed CDs. And in 1997 Hollmer would finish recording -- at a revamped Chickenhouse (the original studio had been torn down in 1992) -- a new solo CD entitled
Andetag, which was released the following year.
Featuring music composed betwixt 1993 and 1996,
Andetag was yet some other acme for Hollmer, paradoxically comfy and ambitious, traditional and cutting edge, with all of the diverse stylistic touchstones -- and singular musical personality -- one had come up to expect from a Lars Hollmer album. Again, to the highest degree of the instruments were played by Hollmer (squeeze box, piano, keyboards, melodicas, and percussion) along with contributions from bassist Wolfgang Salomon, fiddler Santiago Jimenez, drummer Hans Bruniusson, and Von Zamla/Univers Zero bassoonist/oboist Michel Berckmans. In 1999
Andetag won a Swedish Grammy Award, and as part of the awarding Hollmer was cited as follows: "To a whale in the Swedish musical companionship...from Samla Mammas Manna to 'Boeves Psalm' to the new CD
Andetag...there's always rattling music coming from the Chickenhouse." Hollmer also began a new project in 1999, aggregation many of the same musicians as had appeared on
Andetag along with Coste Apetrea (on banjo!), Matti Andersson (on transverse flute), and Kalle Eriksson (on trumpet) for the recording of the neoclassic chamber music-influenced
Utsikter, released in 2000 and a worthy followup to
Andetag.
Meanwhile, the on-again, off-again Samlas had been beckoning, and in fall of 1998 Hollmer, Krantz, Bruniusson, and Apetrea were back together at the Chickenhouse for the recording of
Kaka, a sometimes powerful, sometimes goof transcription including live concert material from 1993-1998 and voice over "comments and interpretations" for the uninitiate by a "teller" named John Fiske. The album was released in 1999, merely in November of that year Bruniusson, wHO had been with the Samlas from the very beginning 30 old age antecedently, relinquish the band. As it turned out, Samla Mammas Manna would carry on afterward some communication theory 'tween Uppsala and a peradventure surprising locating, Japan. In 2000 Hollmer received an invitation from clarinetist Wataru Ohkuma and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida to perform with them in Tokyo. Off he went.
The head trip to Japan pronounced yet another turn in Lars Hollmer's long musical travel, as he united with Ohkuma, Yoshida, and others (notably fiddler Yuriko Mukoujima) to form a new band -- which power be considered a suitable successor to the Looping Home Orchestra -- entitled SOLA. In December 2000 Hollmer performed a number of concerts at Tokyo venue Mandala-2 with this supporting players, and was impressed enough by the experience to return to Japan during summer and fall of the following yr for more concertizing and the transcription of a CD, which was released in 2002 with the title
SOLA: Lars Hollmer's Global Home Project. And with drummer Bruniusson bypast from Samla Mammas Manna, Yoshida agreed to bring together the now legendary avant-prog quartette as his replenishment, bringing an sharp and half-crazed Ruins partake to the Samlas' intelligent. The now Swedish/Japanese Samlas pot be heard on the fourteenth KRAX label firing,
High-priced Mamma, recorded live (from a unmarried DAT recorder in the audience, from the sound of it) in Uppsala on May 16, 2002. The magnetic disk is in particular illustrious for including a drawn-out track recorded in 2001 at some other Uppsala venue -- featuring the quartette of Hollmer, Apetrea, and Ruins' Yoshida and Hisashi Sasaki, "Fredmans Session 2" is more improvisational in nature than most of the Samlas' recorded yield, thus far remains dynamic and focussed, with a high energy level and a signified of aim that never wanders. Keeping the SOLA connection alive, Hollmer returned to Japan in the give of 2003 to do and criminal record in duo with fiddler Mukoujima; some of the results of this sexual union can be heard on the mini-CD
Live and More, the fifteenth KRAX release.
And later on acting with the Looping Home Orchestra and with Accordion Tribe in Victoriaville, Hollmer has kept up his Quebec connections as well. In August and September of 2004 he visited Quebec once over again, qualification an accordion festival appearance in a trio with Jean Derome and drummer Pierre Tanguay, and too performing double at an intimate auberge near the petite Quebec village of St. Fortunat, once with Derome and Tanguay and once with the tierce supplemented by La Fanfare Pourpour, a 19-piece baseless circusy vainglorious band with a street carnival sensibility and friendly, nubbly charm. Hollmer performed in duet with Michel Berckmans at the April 2005 Gouveia Art Rock Festival in Portugal, and both Hollmer and Berckmans joined Montreal avant-prog mainstays Miriodor onstage at the festival as well. Hollmer too contributed squeeze box to Miriodor's double-CD
Parade, released on Cuneiform in May 2005; he recorded his parts in Sweden and added them to Miriodor's compositions through an approach unthinkable when the Chickenhouse resident first-class honours degree picked up a squeezebox -- sending work in progress euphony files back and away across the Atlantic on CD-Rs. And Hollmer returned to the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in May 2005 for another Quebec performance with La Fanfare Pourpour, an wellbeing and rollicking thus far warm and emotionally piquant concert of music penned by Hollmer and orchestrated by Derome, including some young compositions with at least a little angle of the lid to FIMAV's avant-garde mental attitude. In October 2006 Hollmer returned to Quebec to record
Karusell Musik with the Fanfare Pourpour, and the album was released as a joint project of the Krax and Monsieur Fauteux M'Entendez-Vous? labels during give of the undermentioned class.
It's not toilsome to envision Hollmer acting at a common people festival, sway festival, vanguard fete, perhaps most fitly a world music festival (not to reference an squeeze box festival, of course), and upon hearing his euphony it's likewise easygoing to understand how he renders such labels meaningless. Given his many stylistic influences joined with a quite singular persona that unites them all in such compelling fashion, the doors to many audiences should be open broad to him, rather than locked and bolted. But unluckily that's ofttimes non the casing in a world of personalized music boxes. Sooner or later, one hopes that many more listeners will catch on, and that Lars Hollmer's appeal volition stretch forth beyond cult status, however enthusiastic his international audience mightiness be. Then once again, such things power not matter to him -- better to focus on the marvelous euphony that still remains to be made.
Ladytron
