Scandi folk

This is an early post, since I'm going out this afternoon and will be back late.  Which makes it tricky, since there's nothing much that's happened today to blog about.  I am off to Snape Maltings to hear Trio Medieval, an Oslo based group of two Norwegian and one Swedish women who perform a strange and marvellous fusion of Scandinavian folk, medieval and modern music.  I first heard them on the car radio a few years ago, and was utterly transfixed, and quite unable to work out what sort of a thing I was listening to.  I think I sat in my car on a petrol station forecourt until the song ended, because I wouldn't turn the radio off and get out.

More recently I heard something from the Aldeburgh festival on Radio 3, which prompted me to look at the festival website, to see what sort of acts they had, and how much of it was sold out.  I was not even looking to make a last minute booking, merely curious, and as I scrolled down the page I began to think that this festival was going on for a very long time before grasping that the website simply led on into the rest of the season at Snape.  Suddenly, there in late August I saw the name of Trio Medieval.  I had to go.  I've looked at their website in the past, and hoped they might crop up at Kings Place or somewhere, so to have them as close to home as Suffolk was too good a chance to miss.

You can tell a lot about how much you like a group by how far you are willing to travel to see them live.  I once decided I couldn't face spending a night in Swindon just to hear Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, having once seen them as part of the City of London Festival and been blown away. I've been kicking myself ever since, because apart from their Swindon appearance I have only ever spotted one more concert date, at the Irish Centre in Camden, and a spot at the Cambridge Folk Festival.  We made it to Camden, though not Cambridge, and I live in hope that they will grace these shores as a duo once again.  They have been to Union Chapel in Islington as part of a larger line up but I don't want that, just the two of them.  I digress.

Then there was the question of who, if anybody, would like to come with me to Snape.  Polyphonic Scandi folk is really not the System Administrator's sort of thing, and I'd rather go to a concert by myself than drag someone else along to be thoroughly bored, and make me feel guilty for ruining their evening as they sneak a look at their watch every six minutes.  And today is a working day. After some thought I tried a friend from the music society, who seems to have an open minded approach to new cultural experiences.  So far we have been to the Ice Age art exhibition at the British Museum, which I liked but she didn't, and the Dulwich Gallery, where the exhibition passed muster but it rained all day.  It's not a short walk from the station to the gallery, and the gallery attendant was unnecessarily brusque about refusing her admission until she hung up her wet coat on the unguarded row of pegs in their lobby.  Luckily nobody nicked it.  So I hope tonight's entertainment passes muster, or she will begin to lose faith in my cultural expeditions.