Over Tones is the ECM debut of two folk musicians from Hardanger, in western Norway: Benedicte Maurseth, who plays the Hardanger fiddle and sings, and the singer Åsne Valland Nordli. Recorded in 2011 and released by ECM in 2014, it places traditional fiddle tunes and religious folk songs next to the duo's own pieces and free improvisations. One fiddle and two voices are all there is, and the regional tradition is the ground everything else grows from.
Both learned the music of their region young, from its foremost masters. Maurseth began the fiddle at eight with Knut Hamre, studied at the Ole Bull Academy in Voss from 2004 to 2006, and was named Norway's Young Folk Musician of the Year in 2007. Nordli started teaching at the same academy at 14, and at 16 toured with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, singing folk songs by Geirr Tveitt. The two first worked together in 2008 in the vocal project Fodne ho svara stilt, then found shared affinities in an Oslo theatre production and formed the duo in 2011. In May that year they recorded at Audun Strype's studio in Oslo.
The Hardanger fiddle dates back to the 17th century and has sympathetic strings under the bowed ones, and its music is rich in drones and often metrically free. Maurseth's opening Alde is a melody played in harmonics alone, which turns the fiddle, in one reviewer's words, into "a choir of glass". In the jointly written Overtone, dance and drone meet the two voices. The hymn Jesus gjør meg stille and Kilden are traditional songs learned after Ragnar Vigdal. The fiddle tunes Slåtten hans Borgår and Rameslått II come after Knut Heddi, the first with a vocal arrangement by Nordli.
Writing on ECM Reviews in 2015, Tyran Grillo set the album beside the label's other young duos, noting that its roots lie in Norwegian folk music rather than in abstraction. He concluded that it "makes a welcome addition to ECM's new directions." He also linked it to the premodern fiddle records of Nils Økland. The connection is direct: in 2006 Maurseth played with Økland and Hamre on Rosa i botnen, music from Hardanger performed on historical fiddles of the 17th and 18th centuries.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2315, first released on 28 March 2014.
