Music / Polar Night & Midnight Sun, Benedicte Maurseth. At Tuggeranong Arts Centre, November 25. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

Bendicte Maurseth plays the Hardanger fiddle, a violin with four extra strings that run under the fingerboard and through the lower part of the bridge.

These extra strings resonate in sympathy with the bowed strings to give the Hardanger fiddle a unique tonality. It is the national musical symbol of Norway and there is a vast repertoire of traditional dance music played on them.

Maurseth is taking this tradition well beyond the dance music forms to create music somewhere between modern art music, experimental folk and jazz. She works with three musicians, Morten Qvenild, keyboards and electronic processing; Mats Eilertsen, double bass and electronics and Håkon Stene, vibraphone, percussion & electronics. 

Maurseth plays what seem like fragments of dance tunes, using Hardanger fingering and bowing techniques with the other three creating layers of sounds around her. At times she just sat still, listening to the others play, a smile dancing across her lips.

The mainstay of this concert was music from her latest recording project Mirra, which explores the life of reindeer. The music uses field recordings of the sounds reindeer make foraging for food as an underlay for each piece with a combination of keyboard, bass and percussion adding layers of sound. 

Morten Qvenild uses a small Prophet synthesiser and a piano sometimes fed through a cascade of looping and effects pedals to restate the fragmentary melody lines. Håkon Stene spent as much time on vibraphone as anything else, bowing the bars as much as hitting them. The bowed vibraphone blended with Mats Eilertsen’s bowed upright bass and long notes from the synth to create an overall effect where there was no obvious source for any one part of it. 

The concert was three extended sections each of three or so tracks from the album as well as a couple from a previous recording. They cleverly transitioned between the tracks so the changes were obvious, but seamless. 

This was an intriguing and fascinating performance. It was a long way from a concert of traditional Hardanger fiddle music, but immersive and inventive in a different and satisfying way.