Nina Ramsby & Martin Hederos

Some music benefits from being played on crappy sound systems. I listened to Visorna by Nina Ramsby & Martin Hederos on my mobile phone (it is equipped with tiny speakers) at 4 am in the morning. What a serene, elegant, but raw, sound! What I heard sounded like a demo version, recorded in a moment of inspiration, the vocals floating on a bed of piano and organ. When I listen to it on a somewhat more decent device, I am slightly (but only a little) disappointed. Paradoxically, the sound is flatter now. It's usually the other way around. Or maybe it's the timing. I don't know. (I remember car rides with my sister when I was in high school. It was raining all the time and we were studying for some exams in the fluffy room at the library. I was drumming stupid details into my mind, church history. "Saskia" and Dummy were on equally heavy rotation. And Vysotsky. )

Nina Ramsby & Martin Hederos have recorded their versions of more or less classic Swedish and Norwegian songs. So, how do they redeem themselves from the Cheese? For starters, their delivery lacks every attempt at being hip or cool. Instead, Ramsby's vocal performance is one of the most plain I've heard in a long time, plain as in "casual", not "painfully earnest". The combination of vocals and piano (the setting of most of the songs), and also one of the songs, "Jag vet en dejlig rose", pays homage to Monica Zetterlund and Bill Evans' Waltz for Debbie. It's almost just as magic as Evans&Zetterlund, and like Zetterlund, Ramsby conveys a lot of emotion with - this sounds like a cliché - small means. I really dig the way she phrases the songs so that they sound ordinary (sometimes "boring" is close at hand, but I'm, curiously enough, not sure whether that's even a problem!). How far is this not from the theatrical contrivance of the worst interpretations of figures such as Fred Åkerström, Bellman or Cornelis Vreswijk (not to speak of contemporary phenomena such as E. Dahlgren or BoKaspers!), in which musicians try to force some life into what, for different reasons, have become too familiar, too "dinner party friendly" and "cosy", by mounting up great Drama. I remember one album consisting of interpretations of Ewert Taube songs by Swedish pop/rock musicians that was exactly like that. The songs didn't feel any fresher, nor did the lyrics become any more urgent, just because the artists tried to move as far away as possible from the Taube burden: the archipelago, happy people, summer - the incarnation of "folkhem".

Martin Hederos (member of Soundtrack of your life, or whatever the group is called, a band that has never grabbed my attention) has gained a reputation for his treatment of covers. On Together in the darkness he and M. Hellberg present stripped down takes on raunchy numbers such as "No fun" and "Concrete jungle", along with their own songs. Visorna does not deviate from his earlier releases. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. I like this album more than I am ready to admit.

Ramsby & Hederos have also recorded an album with jazz covers, Jazzen, but that one I haven't heard yet. Some songs (some of them with Ludvig Berghe trio) are available on myspace. Sounds good. (Stiltje!) I salute Ramsby's efforts at queering the jazz! I'm excited to hear more about her different projects (she seems to be a very prolific artist). Homepage. There is an awesome clip on Youtube of her perfmance of "Konstnasaren" (Olle Adolphson), from Visorna. (But the album version is even better still) And some blues...

EDIT: I suspected I would tire easily of this album, that it would be too simple to be interesting in the long run. Man, was I wrong! I like it even better now. Each and every tune is growing and growing and growing.