Ah, this ought to be good – anything with “wolf” in the title gets my vote, with certain expectation that canine jaws will soon be locked around my throat within minutes of playing the record. Juhani Silvola from Norway regaled us not many years hence with his fine set of electro-acoustic suites, The Slow Smokeless Burning of Decay which we found to be very rich in ideas, story content, and sympathetic sounds. Plus our man exhibited a good humanistic compassion for the planet, wildlife, and better societal organisation.
Today’s Wolf Hour Roundelay (SHHPUMA SHH072CD) is however chomped from a different dough. On it he plays the “prepared” acoustic guitar and some electronics too, or to be more specific an amplifier and effects pedals. In terms of execution, Juhani Silova exhibits tremendous precision and discipline with his detailed hand-embroidered clusters of notes, and great elan in his sweeps of burnished amplified noise. At no time does it even resemble a guitar. He performed it in a church, there are nine tracks, and their story-like titles indicate his plan – to tell an ambitious tale, half truth, half fiction, half wild guesswork…we begin and end with the theme of “time” and pass through procession, meditations, night-time, mirages and flocks of insects or birds or dragons along the way. Small wonder he invokes the work of that genius Jorge Luis Borges as one of his many inspirations. Looking at that fabulous cover art, and reading the titles, let alone hearing the imaginative music, what a deathless compressed tale Borges could have wrought on his plastic typewriter sourced from La Plata. Legendary and real beasts intermingle with vegetation and plant life straight out of Bosch, and all sense of normal scale is disrupted (this great painting is credited to Travassos).
Besides his interest in ritual and mythology, Silvola is attempting what he calls “speculative sonic archaeology” with this album, which I take to mean that his elaborate set-up – deliberately denaturing his guitar in a John Cage manner – allows him to bypass conventional musical rote and drill down into layers of history, whether it be the history of music or the history of ideas, and bring back samples of tremendous interest in his dredgers, pods, and scoops. Indeed you can hear the determination and focus with which he sets about this important task on every track here, filled with weight and gravity, never distracted from the goal, each note set down as surely if entering it in the pages of a scientific research journal. But I also like the “speculative” side to that utterance, indicating that he doesn’t yet know what he’s going to uncover on this quest. The world needs more such curious artists, who can genuinely help mankind progress, with their lateral thinking and bold experiments. The liner notes remind us that Silvola also happens to have deep knowledge of folk music traditions of the Nordic realms – Finland, Norway, and Scotland too, and for more chapters from that tome, by all means investigate his work with Sarah-Jane Summers – we have heard her playing solo on her fine Hardanger Fiddle, though not their duo music I think.
The whole album is a flawless gem from top to bottom, although the opening track ‘A New Refutation Of Time’ is hard to beat, on strength of title alone it proposes a daring scientific theory that challenges orthodoxy and has everyone at NTNU shaking in their brogues. Wonderful release…I may not have lupine teeth clamped around throat as expected, but it lives up to the claim “simultaneously familiar and strange”. From 22 August 2022.