Hypnotic Sounds: "Naked Raven" on the Lago-Stage in Nürnberg

[Nürnberger Nachrichten - Tuesday, July 27, 1999]

Filigreed guitar chords are drifting through the Lago tent arena while soft percussion rhythms sustain the delicate melodious web. A cello joins in, finally a lamenting violin line. Music like from a remote sphere, radically different as compared to our own world, although "only" coming from the other side of the globe since the quartet called "Naked Raven" is from Australia. In Nürnberg, they showed once more how lyrical and intimate acoustic folk can sound.

The musical horizon of the four is wide indeed. And colorful as well. Guitarist Russ Pinney does not only master the telling of weird stories about nicked bicycles and boring grandparents; writing songs with haunting qualities is what he is especially good at. Laconic and sometimes almost sarcastic love songs for example, filled with life by singer-violinist Erica Grundell.

When Erica, using her aspirate, delicate, inevitably hypnotic mezzo-soprano, moans and murmurs about the inner "wasteland" and confesses hating herself, puncturing her flesh, burning her soul, then these messages hit directly into the heart and leave nobody unimpressed. Sometimes, her singing is only a desperate sobbing, a cry from the dark, a painful rebellion. Then again, the small woman with her great voice walks along almost folksy paths, e.g. wallowing in humorous Sydney-impressions, to which James Richmond dabs and drums the corresponding ethno-grooves on his extensive percussion arsenal.

Kate Mazoudier's emphatic and subtle cello play puts the finishing touches to the arrangements. Any frontiers between earnest and entertaining music become pointless. Erica Grundell uses her violin in accordance with her voice, she makes the instrument whimper and scream, squeak and screech. For some moments, she consciously passes onto the terrain of contemporary classical music with the purpose of putting into perspective and questioning some excessively beautiful and only too catching melodies. Thus, "Naked Raven" build up an own dimension, their own musical realm in which one can forget reality for some time. In other circumstances, only dreams are as beautiful.

Hans von Draminski

Translation: Peter Liehr

© Nürnberger Nachrichten / the author. Published by kind permission.

Links

• Naked Raven, Australia
• Nürnberg, Germany
  • Open air festival: Lago-Open-Air, 25.07.1999
  • Nürnberger Nachrichten, daily newspaper of Nürnberg