Jon Collin - Bridge Variations

To Stockholm we now travel for the latest long-player from the esteemed Jon Collin, a guitarist of some measure broadly steeped within the American Primitive tradition and with a keen avant instinct. The surprise on Bridge Variations, then, is that Collin's guitar has been laid to rest, its place instead taken by a keyed fiddle, an instrument, it must be said, that he continues to wield in a similarly impressionistic manner. Recorded to tape under various bridges scattered across Stockholm, there's an haunting sonority to these six tracks as the droning and ascending cascades of the fiddle intersect with both architecture and the surrounding environmental sound. Is that dripping water, falling rain, or the spit of standing water flicked from the tyres of passing cars? And to what end? The press release informs that bridges hold an meaningful importance in the topological construction of Stockholm, which i suppose makes Bridge Variations folkloric in its own abstracted way, a paean to the city and the life and movement it harbours. If that makes it a concept piece (a little like Will Sergeant's Themes for Grind, now i think of it), so be it, though as a standalone collection, this is truly emotive and affecting music, the use of repeated signature motifs both comforting and transportative. This is music indelibly tied to its city, but what it conjures is elemental enough to feel universal. I guess that's what great folk music does.