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FALTRIQUEIRA
Faltriqueira (Resistencia RESCD 140)

At last emerging from the hotbed of Galicia's upsurge in roots instrumental music, is the rightful status of singing. At first it was the presence of a singer, usually female, as either a member or guest of an otherwise largely instrumental band, but now it is female vocal groups, continuing and expanding on the tradition of pandeireteras - groups of women singers accompanying themselves on pandeiretas, tambourines.

Faltriqueira - Maria López, Ana Leira, Carolina Rodríguez, Teresa García and Olalla López - have been together for five years or so, singing on their own or as guests with other bands, particularly with the powerful Luar Na Lubre. Their material is from the popular tradition, and they perform it with the traditional exuberant, hard-edged young-girl vocal sound, which is usually in unison but in their case is developed to some extent with harmony and part-singing.

Parallel roots booms in other parts of northern Iberia have resulted in enhanced movement of musicians and exchange of ideas along the north coast. So it is that Faltriqueira's first album was made in a studio in Euskadi and features a number of Basque musicians. The producer, musical director and instrumental arranger is Euskadi-resident, French multi-instrumentalist and composer Pascal Gaigne. As well as his own albums and film scores, for years he has been creating masterly arrangements for Basque singer Amaia Zubiria, most recently on her 2002 album Haatik.

For Faltriqueira he has drawn on a wide palette a sweeping Arabic favour of flutes, darabukkas, pandeiro and Gaigne's guitar and oud for Palmira's sinuous tune, sonorous cello, cor anglais and accordeon against intricate guitar in A Herba De Namorar, or for Agarrado De Brañas Verdes, just Javi Area's percussion interplaying with Oreka TX's pattering txalaparta. Nana/ Beijai gets a liquid, dreamy treatment of echoed guitar around the solo vocal of the first section, which moves to vocal layering with a seductive, sliding semitone rise-and-fall motif. The txalaparta duo reappear with the skittering trikitixa of Kepa Junkera, in whose band they play, in a very natural meeting of Galician and Euskal for Labrada De Cortellas. It's not until track 10, Muñeira Vella De Mórdomo, that the Galician gaita, in the hands of Daniel López, makes its entry; a couple of tracks later it goes on to initiate a pandeirada of the traditional form, just ricketing pandeiretas and unison voices. The closing track, Sae Lúa, is a gorgeous thing of overlapping voices and Arabic-inflected western-orchestral string arrangement, pulsed by pizzicatos, dumbek and fluttering darabukkas.

There's none of the levelling, obscuring instrumental mush that has sometimes afflicted major northern Iberian roots-enhancement projects. Every track is an alert, intelligent arrangement in which the vocals and catchy melodies are in charge, and the pandeiretas are not produced away but have their natural role. What remains in the memory has the true melodious essence and spirit of the Galician song tradition, whose ongoing life this album and the work of today's new pandeireteras does much to assure. (It's no mere accident of design that Mercedes Peón's album Isué, a clarion call in what's developing, bears the sun-like symbol of a curly-edged pandeireta jingle.) - Andrew Cronshaw

Article is copright 200 Southern Rag/fROOTS, and is used by permission
No reproduction is allowed wiothout the specific permission of the publishers.

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