Lars Hollmer

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风格: #瑞典民谣　#先锋前卫摇滚　#前卫摇滚
地区: 欧美

艺人介绍

by Dave LynchIn the years since Lars Hollmer first got together with his friends to play music in late-'60s Sweden, it seems unlikely that his primary goal has been rock stardom. For one thing, there is his choice of instruments, with the accordion looming large among them. Although certain accordionists have over the years acquired a hipster cachet, from the internationally acclaimed nuevo tango master Astor Piazzolla through renowned but lesser-known squeezeboxers like New York City denizens Guy Klucevsek (a Hollmer collaborator in Accordion Tribe) and Andrea Parkins, the accordion probably suffers from the lingering images of Lawrence Welk polka shtick, provoking snickers from the narrow-minded who remain clueless about how forward-thinking, and indeed radical and revolutionary, accordion music can be.

Secondly, Hollmer is most closely identified with a musical style that suffers from nearly universal hoots of derision -- progressive rock -- although to claim he fits comfortably in a list of acts such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, and King Crimson would certainly indicate a misunderstanding about the nature of his art. For if there is one quality that Lars Hollmer's music lacks, it would be pretentiousness, a hallmark of progressive rock in large part responsible for the style's critical drubbing. Still, if you must place Hollmer in a box, it appears that for most people progressive rock will do, and that might lead some to dismiss him out of hand, without even giving him a listen.

And finally, there is the very warmth, intimacy, and even innocence of Hollmer's music, which gives avant-gardists of the all-knowing variety a reason to turn a deaf ear. For although he makes music that can be abrasive and even a bit demented at times, with rough textures, quirky instrumentation, and odd time signatures, Hollmer's compositions can also be tuneful and accessible, sometimes catchy, and often disarmingly lovely. These are not the qualities many avant-gardists look for as indicators of forward-thinking music. One more strike against him.

Something that seems to be working in his favor, however, is perseverence, although that word has a connotation of toil and struggle entirely inappropriate in Hollmer's case. Rather, as the decades pass, he seems to be enjoying himself too much to stop, and although that aforementioned rock stardom is likely to remain elusive, Hollmer seems to have garnered enough in the way of worldwide cult status to find musical collaborators -- and eager although relatively small audiences -- from Quebec to Japan. He has even been known to make a rare foray into the U.S.A. -- a hotbed of avant-garde prog rock accordion music if there ever was one -- and find himself faced with new post-concert fans scrambling to buy up all the KRAX-label CDs he's brought with him from the Chickenhouse.

The Chickenhouse, by the way, is the location where most of Lars Hollmer's recorded music has been made, either through the magic of overdubbing many Hollmers on a wide array of instruments or by Lars and friends, beginning with his '70s compatriots in Swedish avant-prog and quirky jazz-rock fusion, Samla Mammas Manna and their offshoots such as Zamla Mammaz Manna and Von Zamla. Located outside of Uppsala, Sweden, the Chickenhouse is a recording studio -- and also Hollmer's home -- where the first incarnation of the Samlas assembled in 1969-1970 to record the band's initial, eponymous album. The band was a trio at that point, featuring Hollmer on keyboards along with bassist Lars Krantz and drummer Hans Bruniusson. Although it might have been difficult to envision in those early days, Hollmer, Krantz, and Bruniusson would find themselves back at a rebuilt Chickenhouse studio nearly 30 years later, recording a brand-new Samlas CD, Kaka (form your own conclusions about the title), along with guitarist Coste Apetrea. Compared to the other three bandmembers, one might call Apetrea a relative newcomer to the fold, although the operative word would be "relative," since Apetrea first joined the group in 1972.

Throughout the 1970s, Hollmer was best known for his work under the Samla/Zamla umbrella, in groupings that featured him in a prominent role as co-composer and strongly fusion-oriented electric keyboardist, but not "leader" per se. The music mixed prog and jazz-rock elements with stylistic wild cards ranging from wacky nonsense vocals to atmospheric free improvisation, an adventurous enough combination for the group (after undergoing a name change to Zamla Mammaz Manna and adding guitarist Eino Haapala as a replacement for the temporarily departing Apetrea) to join an aggregation of European avant-prog bands -- including Henry Cow, Univers Zero, and Etron Fou Leloublan -- under the Rock in Opposition umbrella. Given that Samla/Zamla LPs (on the Silence label) were mainly available in the United States through specialized mail-order outfits like Wayside Music (www.waysidemusic.com, still a good source for Hollmer recordings), most stateside listeners first heard Hollmer and other Zamla members through their involvement in Fred Frith's Gravity album (released in the States on Ralph Records), half of which was recorded at the Chickenhouse in August 1979. The album mixed the Henry Cow guitarist's skewed sonic explorations with a distinct European folk dance feel, to which Hollmer and company were important contributors.

From March to June 1980, the Zamlas recorded and released Familjesprickor (aka Family Cracks), which was according to the liner notes "made during a period of transition," leading to music "which is not as optimistic and happy as it used to be." As it turned out, this would be the last Zamlas appearance on record until Kaka was released in 1998 (the band re-formed in the early '90s but it took until 1998 for the evidence to turn up on disc). In the early '80s Hollmer would turn his attention toward Von Zamla and to his own solo efforts, which would reveal steady artistic growth.

With the cracks in the Zamla family finally leading to the group's dissolution, Hollmer and Haapala (perhaps becoming a Lennon & McCartney or Becker & Fagen of Swedish avant-prog) joined with two members of eccentric French avant-popster Albert Marcoeur's band to form the Von Zamla quartet and continue waving the flag of folk-flavored instrumental experimental and avant-prog rock (with perhaps a bit of fusion and neo-classicism thrown into the mix for variety's sake). In 1982 the first Von Zamla album, Zamlaranamma, was released, and the group soon expanded to a sextet lineup, touring Europe and recording a second album, No Make Up!, at the Chickenhouse in May and August 1983. As of the mid-2000s, the most widely distributed document of Von Zamla is the live CD entitled 1983, recorded live in Bremen and released by Cuneiform in 1999. As Hollmer says in his enthusiastic liner notes, the band toured by bus and played a huge array of instruments, including various keyboards, guitar, bass, accordion, melodica, drums, glockenspiel, bassoon, oboe, English horn, and ring modulator, not to mention such percussive devices as "homemade plate," "metal pin-filled cans," and "bottles of different kinds."

And although he notes that Von Zamla "had TREMENDOUS FUN!!," Hollmer was at this time beginning to truly assert himself through his solo efforts apart from the band, beginning with 1981's XII Sibiriska Cyklar, which he had recorded entirely solo at the Chickenhouse in June and October of 1980 and March of 1981. Vill du Hora Mer, the first release on Hollmer's KRAX label, followed in 1982; then came Från Natt Idag in 1983 and Tonöga in 1985. Hollmer sang and played nearly all the instruments on these albums (all recorded at the Chickenhouse), which ranged from warm and intimate folk-flavored songs to wild yet tuneful and focused instrumental compositions that defied categorization. Meanwhile, Von Zamla broke up in fall of 1984, briefly re-forming with an altered lineup in 1985 before splitting up for good.

As it turned out, however, 1985 was an important year for Hollmer, marking the formation of his first group as a leader, the Looping Home Orchestra. The LHO toured Europe in 1986 and 1987, during those years also recording the fifth KRAX-label album, Vendeltid, at the Chickenhouse with a five-man lineup. Vendeltid was a high watermark for Hollmer, retaining all the charm, melodiousness, and inventive rhythms of his earlier solo efforts (not to mention his work with the Samlas) with music of sometimes haunting and ethereal beauty, with tones somewhere between the lightness of Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the darkness of Univers Zero. Selections from the five solo Hollmer releases of the 1980s, including Vendeltid, were later compiled onto the 1993 single-CD set entitled Lars Hollmer 80-88 (later reissued as The Siberian Circus), and well illustrate his artistic growth during the decade. In the disc's liners, Fred Frith noted the futility of assigning stylistic descriptors to Hollmer, indicating that, like all great composers, Hollmer's work touches the listener at a deeper level.

"Like Astor Piazzolla, Lars Hollmer is a serious composer working in a popular traditional language and one who defines his own terms," Frith wrote. "Sometimes Lasse's manic skittishness and infectious enthusiasm give way to the most eloquent expression of our inherent loneliness that I know of," Frith continued. "This is no small gift."

It is in Hollmer's compositions at this time that one begins to hear the echo of classical works of a magical mood -- Saint-Saëns' Aquarium from Le Carnaval des Animaux for example -- but with a rustic quality entirely absent from the concert hall, as if the (in his case Hungarian) folk themes Bartók discovered and used in his compositions had been wrested away from the classical setting and returned to their earthier points of origin, while also somehow maintaining a contemporary feel. And yet Hollmer's music was not merely a facile appropriation of folk themes to rock music in the manner that proggers "rocked the classics" -- his music maintained an authenticity, originality, and depth of feeling that the far more prosaic rock bands rarely even hinted at.

In 1988 the original LHO played its last concert, but new incarnations of the group would follow, and Hollmer would continue to pen new compositions for the ensemble. In 1992 the fourth version of the group consisted of Hollmer, Haapala, Krantz, and Frith along with keyboardist/percussionist Olle Sundin and Montreal multi-instrumentalist Jean Derome; this band performed at the 1992 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Quebec and then toured Europe in 1993; selections recorded at FIMAV and on the European tour were released on Door Floor Something Window: Live 1992-1993 on the Victo label in 1994. In many ways, the recording represented a culmination of Hollmer's work as a solo artist to date, with dynamic and fiery live performances and off-kilter sonic touches wedded inseparably to the composer's evocative melodies and overarching compositional sense -- but there would be far more to come. By 1996 Hollmer would be a member of Accordion Tribe, an international quintet of accordionists including Guy Klucevsek, Maria Kalaniemi, Bratko Bibic, and Otto Lechner; the group would concertize widely in Europe and Canada and release two acclaimed CDs. And in 1997 Hollmer would finish recording -- at a revamped Chickenhouse (the original studio had been torn down in 1992) -- a new solo CD entitled Andetag, which was released the following year.

Featuring music composed between 1993 and 1996, Andetag was yet another peak for Hollmer, paradoxically comfortable and challenging, traditional and cutting-edge, with all of the diverse stylistic touchstones -- and singular musical personality -- one had come to expect from a Lars Hollmer album. Again, most of the instruments were played by Hollmer (accordion, piano, keyboards, melodicas, and percussion) along with contributions from bassist Wolfgang Salomon, violinist Santiago Jimenez, drummer Hans Bruniusson, and Von Zamla/Univers Zero bassoonist/oboist Michel Berckmans. In 1999 Andetag won a Swedish Grammy Award, and as part of the award Hollmer was cited as follows: "To a giant in the Swedish musical society...from Samla Mammas Manna to 'Boeves Psalm' to the new CD Andetag...there's always wonderful music coming from the Chickenhouse." Hollmer also began a new project in 1999, assembling many of the same musicians as had appeared on Andetag along with Coste Apetrea (on banjo!), Matti Andersson (on flute), and Kalle Eriksson (on trumpet) for the recording of the neo-classical chamber music-influenced Utsikter, released in 2000 and a worthy follow-up to Andetag.

Meanwhile, the on-again, off-again Samlas had been beckoning, and in fall of 1998 Hollmer, Krantz, Bruniusson, and Apetrea were back together at the Chickenhouse for the recording of Kaka, a sometimes powerful, sometimes zany recording including live concert material from 1993-1998 and voice-over "comments and interpretations" for the uninitiated by a "narrator" named John Fiske. The album was released in 1999, but in November of that year Bruniusson, who had been with the Samlas from the very beginning 30 years previously, quit the band. As it turned out, Samla Mammas Manna would carry on after some communications between Uppsala and a perhaps surprising location, Japan. In 2000 Hollmer received an invitation from clarinetist Wataru Ohkuma and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida to perform with them in Tokyo. Off he went.

The trip to Japan marked yet another turn in Lars Hollmer's long musical journey, as he joined with Ohkuma, Yoshida, and others (notably violinist Yuriko Mukoujima) to form a new band -- which might be considered a worthy successor to the Looping Home Orchestra -- entitled SOLA. In December 2000 Hollmer performed a number of concerts at Tokyo venue Mandala-2 with this ensemble, and was impressed enough by the experience to return to Japan during summer and fall of the following year for more concertizing and the recording of a CD, which was released in 2002 with the title SOLA: Lars Hollmer's Global Home Project. And with drummer Bruniusson gone from Samla Mammas Manna, Yoshida agreed to join the now legendary avant-prog quartet as his replacement, bringing an incisive and crazed Ruins touch to the Samlas' sound. The now Swedish/Japanese Samlas can be heard on the 14th KRAX label release, Dear Mamma, recorded live (from a single DAT recorder in the audience, from the sound of it) in Uppsala on May 16, 2002. The disc is particularly notable for including a lengthy track recorded in 2001 at another Uppsala venue -- featuring the quartet of Hollmer, Apetrea, and Ruins' Yoshida and Hisashi Sasaki, "Fredmans Session 2" is more improvisational in nature than most of the Samlas' recorded output, yet remains dynamic and focused, with a high energy level and a sense of purpose that never wanders. Keeping the SOLA connection alive, Hollmer returned to Japan in the spring of 2003 to perform and record in duet with violinist Mukoujima; some of the results of this pairing can be heard on the mini-CD Live and More, the 15th KRAX release.

And after performing with the Looping Home Orchestra and with Accordion Tribe in Victoriaville, Hollmer has maintained his Quebec connections as well. In August and September of 2004 he visited Quebec once again, making an accordion festival appearance in a trio with Jean Derome and drummer Pierre Tanguay, and also performing twice at an intimate auberge near the tiny Quebec village of St. Fortunat, once with Derome and Tanguay and once with the threesome supplemented by La Fanfare Pourpour, a 19-piece wild circusy big band with a street carnival sensibility and friendly, homespun charm. Hollmer performed in duet with Michel Berckmans at the April 2005 Gouveia Art Rock Festival in Portugal, and both Hollmer and Berckmans joined Montreal avant-prog mainstays Miriodor on-stage at the festival as well. Hollmer also contributed accordion to Miriodor's double-CD Parade, released on Cuneiform in May 2005; he recorded his parts in Sweden and added them to Miriodor's compositions through an approach unthinkable when the Chickenhouse resident first picked up a squeezebox -- sending work-in-progress music files back and forth across the Atlantic on CD-Rs. Hollmer returned to the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in May 2005 for another Quebec performance with La Fanfare Pourpour, an upbeat and rollicking yet warm and emotionally engaging concert of music penned by Hollmer and orchestrated by Derome, including some new compositions with at least a slight tip of the hat to FIMAV's avant-garde attitude. In October 2006 Hollmer returned to Quebec to record Karusell Musik with the Fanfare Pourpour, and the album was released as a joint project of the Krax and Monsieur Fauteux M'Entendez-Vous? labels during spring of the following year.

In November 2007, Hollmer's latest solo release, Viandra, was issued in Japan by the Disk Union label, followed by a U.S. release by Cuneiform in May 2008. A somewhat reflective and at times even melancholic album -- although certainly leavened by the expected moments of happiness and exuberance -- Viandra was recorded between 2001 and 2007 at the Chickenhouse, with Hollmer multi-tracking himself on a variety of instruments (and also creating the cover photo collage); a number of longstanding collaborators also participated, notably Michel Berckmans and Santiago Jimenez. Almost astonishingly given Hollmer's nearly 40-year recording career, the Cuneiform edition of Viandra is his first U.S. album release as a solo artist.

It's not hard to envision Lars Hollmer performing at a folk festival, rock festival, avant-garde festival, perhaps most appropriately a world music festival (not to mention an accordion festival, of course), and upon hearing his music it's also easy to understand how he renders such labels meaningless. Given his many stylistic influences coupled with a quite singular persona that unites them all in such compelling fashion, the doors to many audiences should be open wide to him, rather than locked and bolted. But unfortunately that's often not the case in a world of individualized music boxes. Sooner or later, one hopes that many more listeners will catch on, and that Lars Hollmer's appeal will extend beyond cult status, however enthusiastic his international audience might be. Then again, such things might not matter to him -- better to focus on the wonderful music that still remains to be made.

Lars Hollmer

艺人介绍

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