Snowflake Trio - Sun Dogs (2019)

Just as each snowflake is different, the Snowflake Trio promise variety in their live concerts, likewise Sun Dogs, their first album, is itself a thing of gorgeous, stirring variation.

The trio are Norwegians Frode Halti on accordion and Vegar Vårdal on hardanger and fiddle, and Irish flute player Nuala Kennedy (The Alt, Oirialla, Fine Friday – read our review of her most recent solo album Behave the Bravest). They formed in Dundalk, Co. Louth in Ireland (Nuala’s home town) in 2009 when Louth Contemporary Music Society founder Eamonn Quinn had the idea of bringing Norwegian musicians together with Irish Traditional musicians. Nuala has said that when they came together the music just ‘clicked’, despite it being the first time the Norwegian musicians had worked with an Irish flute and first time Nuala had worked with a hardanger fiddle. That, now 10 year, connection is very evident on Sun Dogs.


The opening track What Will We Do / Fjellvåk (Mountain Bird) combines a song which many will recognise with a waltz (which can also be heard on The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc first album). What Will We Do was first recorded from Mary Delaney, an Irish traveller from Co. Tipperary, in London in the 1970s by collectors Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie (it can be found on the double CD From Puck to Appleby MTCD325-6). The song has been sung by June Tabor and Maddy Prior in 1988 on their second Silly Sisters album, No More to the Dance and more recently, in a quite different, dirge-like version by Radie Peat on Lankum’s Between The Earth And Sky.

The contrast in the trio’s version between a rather mournful waltz and Nuala’s bright singing of this simple but powerful song, which she learned from Dervish’s Cathy Jordan, shouldn’t work but does resplendently.

Two instrumental compositions by Nuala, The Green Lady and A Face For Scuba first appeared on Enthralled, the wonderful 2011 album of original fiddle-flute duets with Canadian Oliver Schroer (sadly Enthralled was finished just prior to his untimely death in 2008). The version here of The Green Lady, a tune inspired by the tale of the ghost a young girl that is said to haunt Tulloch Castle in the Scottish Highlands, with accordion taking the place of piano, brings out the eeriness and edginess of the tune. Both tunes exemplify Nuala’s perky, almost cheeky sounding, tunes and versatile flute playing.

The imaginative bringing together of what might seem like unlikely component parts continues on Gjendines Bådnlåt (Gjendine’s Lullaby)/Ri Tas is Fuachd (In Heat and Cold). The tune Gjendines Bådnlåt is a traditional Norwegian lullaby and is particularly well known as a result of being sung by Kaia Gjendine Slaalien, a young milkmaid, to Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in 1891 (it is included along with many more of her ballads and lullabies in his 1896 collection of “19 Norwegian Folk Songs – Op.66” which he arranged for the piano). Nuala wrote the lyric influenced by a poem written by Scottish Gaelic poet Uisdean Laing from South Uist. The result sounds bleak and ancient, effortlessly melding melody and song. The same approach succeeds once again on Ceol Sidhe (Fairy Music)/Amerika-Vise (Emigrant Song). The lyric is a poem of longing for home, and the music of home, written in 1916 by Irish soldier-poet Francis Ledwidge from Meath whilst fighting in France. It is sung to a tune that comes from a traditional Norwegian song about emigration to America and, with an almost chamber music-like quality, the tune carries the strikingly haunting, redolent song perfectly.

Accordion, fiddle and flute sound as if they are dancing around each other on The Butterfly/Gudmunddansen. The Butterfly is a slip jig associated with the late Irish fiddler Tommy Potts and Planxty recorded a very different version on their first album. The evocative version here is different again, starting slowly and building, in a way that brings The Gloaming to mind, then sliding into the second, brisker Norwegian dance tune Gudmunddansen, a hopsar, which is an older form of polka. Å, Jeg Vet En Seter, is an instrumental variation of a popular Norwegian children’s song. Built on a repeated accordion bass refrain, fiddle and flute play out a swirling, dramatic tune, which as it progresses has an intensity reminiscent of Seamus Ennis’s The Fox Chase or Duncan Wood and Cathal McConnell’s Hunting The Hare.

It these days of digital downloads and streaming it is an utter joy to have in your hands a CD booklet as attractive and informative as this one. What makes it really exceptional is the multiple whole page reproductions of microphotographs of snowflakes, which really brings home the startling uniqueness of every snowflake. The photographs were taken by Wilson A. Bentley in Vermont U.S.A in the late1800s. Bentley was a pioneer of photographing very small objects by connecting his camera to a microscope – he photographed more than 5000 snowflakes in his lifetime. Sun dog? Turns out it’s a halo effect that shows a bright spot to one or both sides of the Sun, caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. There is a lot more on offer with this album than ‘just’ heaps of very good music.

Sun Dogs weaves together a rich diversity of cultural references ranging across place, poetry in different languages, traveller song, and lullabies. The song and tune combinations are as varied as the music itself, which takes Irish and Norwegian tunes and brings them together in sets that flawlessly mix those different traditions. Each track sounds at the same time completely natural and completely distinctive. The album was recorded live a small lakeside cottage in Norway and the band describe leaving space for freely improvised sections, which you can hear in the midst of each carefully crafted piece.

Snowflake Trio’s first album has delicate, intricate playing but plenty of grit and earthiness when it fits. The stitching together of many-faceted parts into impressively cohesive whole musical pieces is key to its brilliance. Sun Dogs contains a wealth of diverse, nourishing music and is an all-round thing of beauty.