WÖR: Artist of the Month August 2021

 

WÖR

About Towers

Naxos

 

Let’s travel to Belgium for our artist of the month. WÖR–I think it’s Flemish for “word,” but you try finding a Flemish-to-English dictionary–is a quintet that does retro music. Its new release About Towers is subtitled “New Energy for Old Belgian Music.” By that they mean, really old; an earlier album was titled Back to the 1780s. They are so retro that even though some of their music sounds faintly Celtic or even ambient in a New Age sort of way, all 14 tracks on About Towers have been arranged for chamber music and one tracked it titled “Aria.” The closest analogous band in recent memory that pops to mind is the now-defunct French ensemble Malicorne, which was anchored by Gabriel Yacoub and recorded on Elektra, which was gobbled up in 2004 .  

 

WÖR is an all-instrumental outfit that amplifies instruments that don’t conventionally go together: banjo, nylon-string guitar, accordion, fiddle, Flemish bagpipes, musette, and baritone and soprano saxophones. Electrification allows softer instruments to compete with the brass, but it also allows WÖR to bend pitches. For instance, on “Beyaert.” Pietererjan Van Kerckhoven’s pipes evoke a hurdy gurdy and Breton music, though neither is the case. In another what-are-we-really-hearing scenario, banjo and guitar notes sound like gentle rain on “Ketting,” but the soprano sax like a recorder. The piece is a chamber music/court dance mashup until Fabio Di Meo comes in with robust baritone sax and Joroen Goegebuer lets loose with some unrestrained fiddling. Yet the same piece is like numerous WÖR compositions in that it takes us from pastoral to lively and back to pastoral. Whenever WÖR need to anchor compositions in ways that many bands do with bass or percussion, they turn to the baritone sax or amped foot stomps.

 

“Climate March” is indeed a march, but a layered one. It’s not really a suite, but its structure suggests one. Another in a similar vein is “Jolies Filles,” which is drifting in a good way. As I type this, summer is winding down a bit but “Jolies Filles” put me in mind of celebrating the lightness of spring. It’s like the flip side of “Ketting” in that it unfolds slowly, gathers pace, tamps down the tempo, then builds it up again. Another I really liked is the soothing “Cecilia.” Jonas Scheys’ banjo rings like a bell and Bert Ruymbeek’s accordion sprays are as sweet as those from the musette. (The musette is not blown like many bagpipes and this makes it more akin to an oboe than to, say, the Highland bagpipes.)

 

Towers is a breath of fresh air at a time in which too many bands sound alike or draw from the same bag of tricks. At present there are a limited number of audio/video clips from the new album, but if you’d like to get a sense of what WÖR sounds like live, try “Marcel” from the 2016 Shetland Folk Festival, a live performance of “VB7ibis,” or a clip from Folk at the Froize. These three sets are not on “Towers” and have more stage energy, but they give an idea of the styles and compositional twists from this talented Belgian band.   

 

Rob Weir