Receiver

Receiver begins with a fiddle drone, as if this has been going on already and you have happened upon it. It captures your attention. Something, it suggests, is going to happen, but you must be patient. Almost an hour later the album ends with ‘Waltz from Lozère’, a gentle, lively melody. Its final banjo note is an inevitable end. Then you notice the almost imperceptible distant sounds of people, talking, perhaps in another room. Something has been completed – but something is continuing, too.

Between this non-beginning and non-end come motifs, musical sketches, ideas passed between siblings Rowan and Anna Rheingans, their fiddles, banjos and, in ‘Moustiques dans les Mûres’, the alto saxophone of guest musician Rachael Cohen. There are sparse, fragmentary lyrics. ‘Insomnia’ is the kind of ear-worm that would prevent sleep. ‘Urjen’ begins with a recording from 1935 of the Norwegian fiddle player Jørgen Tjønnstaul. The Rheingans Sisters join in, not as if accompanying him, but tentatively picking up the tune, learning through listening and waiting. Receiver is Scandi-noir, but tinged with joy and avant-garde trad. Of course, The Rheingans Sisters have created this entrancing, enigmatic music, but it sounds as if they have, through patient attention, received it, and are now delivering this gift to us.