Veer

Griselda Sanderson and Ricardo de Noronha met on stage a couple of years ago and have been making music together ever since. Sanderson is a violinist who plays a number of bowed instruments on Veer: the nyckelharpa, Hardanger fiddle and ritti (a single-stringed instrument from West Africa). De Noronha is a percussionist from Portugal who is influenced by drumming styles from the Middle East all the way to Scandinavia. He also plays flutes such as the Slovakian shepherd's fujara, and other wind instruments that he makes himself.
The duo bring this instrumental and stylistic range to bear on the beautiful melodies they compose, but they are in no way constrained by the tunes. Both musicians are open to the possibilities of improvisation, and there is a joyful, if sometimes meandering, spontaneity to the album. ‘Dan Moi’ is an arresting track that grows out of a conversation between Jew's harps made from bullets left over from the Vietnam War. They are also sensitive to the sounds of the natural world and incorporate these. In ‘Fernworthy Circle’ they play a ‘log xylophone’ – a pile of logs they came across in the forest – and elsewhere use pebbles to make mouth drums. At one point it sounds as if one of them is playing their teeth with a fingernail.