Review | Songlines

Written in Water

Rating: ★★★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

Shooglenifty & Dhun Dhora

Label:

Shoogle Records

December/2018

There's a sense of loss as well as near-chaotic celebration about this collaboration between musicians of the Scottish Highlands and Rajasthan. Both Shooglenifty and the desert-dwelling Dhun Dhora had lost crucial players shortly before they convened at the Mehrangarh Fort, home of Rajasthan's annual Jodhpur RIFF festival, to record.

Hearing the Shoogles' late fiddler Angus R Grant, who died in 2016, playing the opening air, ‘Bovaglie's Plaid’, somehow indicates how far his colleagues had travelled without him to make music that joins two distant traditions in a grooving communion. His temporary replacement, Laura Jane Wilkie, a fiddler well versed in fusing musical styles with Glasgow's jazz-funk-folk juggernaut Fat-Suit, fits right in, playing with authority and contributing a Scottish tumbling, accelerating rejoinder to Dhun Dhora's ‘Avalu’.

Elsewhere, there's a relaxed groove beneath Kaela Rowan's singing of the humorous puirt à beul ‘A'Bhriogais Uallach’, which feeds into impassioned, searching Rajasthani vocals and a marvellous, energetic dhol drum call-and-response in ‘Nigel's Escape’. Throughout, the air of mystery that has informed Shooglenifty's sound for the past 25 years continues to work its charm, this time with the sounds of Rajasthani master musicians.

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