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The Family Elan, "Stare of Dawn"
On Stare of Dawn the Chris Hladowski (Scatter and The One Ensemble) helmed The Family Elan is intuitively shaping new music from traditional ethnic folk forms. With melodic phrases and sounds from (what sounds like it could be) the Baltic States, Turkey or the Middle East, Hladowski even summons up medieval folk to contribute to the mix of flavours. Playing instruments like bouzouki and long-necked lute (I think) he creates a drive and draw as the music falls in and out of stable forms, reluctant to come back to earth to settle as a model melody.
Complemented by Hanna Tuulikki's (Nalle / Scatter) tangling fiddle and woodwind, there are light circlets of drone around some of the playing. But Hladowski's playing feels most heavily indebted to rhythms, the individual layers may be gently picked and played but it is possible to hear his strumming as a refined thrash of tantalizing colours and notes. The actual rhythms played here, a tambourine's sharp petal shake, take second place to this more fluid playing. Movement feels an inferred recurring theme here, the spinning sense of dervish motion on "Monumental" and the river flow majesty of "Cascade Danse of Airs."
While not an obvious spiritually indebted record, Stare of Dawn feels like it delicately flirts with something above and beyond. The lyrics are reasonably scarce, seeming more like chants or entreaties than clear-cut lyricism. There is a snag in the splendor of sound that comes right at the album's end, "Over the Hills and Fields I Wander (The Dells of Earthly Wonder)" seems to unspool unsatisfying to its conclusion. Notwithstanding this slip, Stare of Dawn is an intimate and precious record.
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