“He’ll have you in a dither with his zither!”.  So went the trailers for the Carol Reed/Graham Greene masterpiece The Third Man, featuring Orson Welles running through the shadows of Vienna, a big wheel, something about a cuckoo clock, and Anton Karas’s zither.  “A zither?”, the audiences must have thought, “What the hell is the that?  But it has a Z in it, and I’m well up for a bit of dithering, so I’ll have two tickets please, and do you sell any popcorn in 1949?”.  Hence assuring the film’s success.  Here are a couple of photos of Anton Karas; note the hangers-on, groupies and general ditherers…

It has taken some time for another zither-based record to come my way (57 years would be an exaggeration, although I like to exaggerate, finding it really big and really clever).  I wouldn’t have expected to find it on Rune Grammofon, although perhaps the core strength of Rune Grammofon is its inherent unpredictability – silence next to noise, precision next to wild improvisation.  No dithering, generally.  It was through a Rune round-up, Money Will Ruin Everything, that I first became aware of Svalastog - via a track under his own name, which sounded like a minor Biosphere (an Eden Project, maybe), and one as part of the group Information.

New album Woodwork marks a stunning change of direction, caused by the discovery of something called a harpeleik, essentially a Norwegian zither, which once belonged to his grandfather (a nice quote from Svalastog on the Rune Grammofon website:“It appeared that he had been a fiddler before he lost all his fingers at the sawmill and converted to become a hardcore pietist, setting down a prohibition against music, dancing, card-playing and television. That made me want to convert as well, from digital medias to real playing”). 

Typical pieces begin quietly with some acoustic fragments, which are pulled together by a sort of internal gravity, coalescing into loops.  These spin for variable periods before being joined by various satellites, with further samples, drones, effects and noise, which stabilise the revolutions,  create tides and weather patterns, and allow life to exist on planet Svalastog.

Opener “Wood Metal Friction” does pretty much what it says on the tin; rubbing metallic whine against a ten second loop of acoustic melody (echoed in recurrent dream fashion by the later “Centreline Reminder”), which is harried with increasing menace by bleep and buzz.  “Snow Tracer” sheds its gentle patterns as if it has just come in from the Norwegian cold and is removing layers of clothes, relaxing in front of the understated industry of “Reconnecting Joints”, which scuttles off  to fetch it a cup of tea.  The album is full of  bewitching attention to detail, each listen revealing fresh discoveries, such as the gossamer stitching of minute electronic and zither snatches to create the fragile rhythms of “White Oak White Pine” and the wonderfully prosaically titled “Cow Goat Goat” (named as if listing the first three animals seen on a train journey through rural Norway). 

Rune Grammofon have set the bar high in 2006 with the release of Thomas Stronen’s mighty Pohlitz.  While Woodwork can’t compete with that release’s dizzying percussive rush, it compensates via creation of a timelessly consistent and cohesive world, a world in which I may just decide to dither for a while longer.