Janne Eraker
  • JANNE
  • ABOUT
  • WORK
  • Movements for Listening
  • ALBUM BLOG
  • DATES
  • PRESS

Album blog

Single nr. 2: Chair Variations, with One Small Step

2/2/2023

 
One Small Step is a trio that I’ve been working in for a long time. It started with a collaboration with Roger Arntzen, the double bass player, when I still lived in the Netherlands. Separately from this I was interested in the combination of Hardingfele (a traditional Norwegian fiddle with a double set of strings) and tap dance, and had begun playing a little bit with Vegar Vårdal. On a special occasion, when the great tap dancers Heather Cornell and Thomas Wadelton were in Oslo for a concert I organized, we played all together, and have ever since. It’s the only track on the album that’s not performed by a duo. 

We always improvise, and more or less anything is possible. When we practice, we often record ourselves and listen back together. This gives me a better overview over what actually happened, which choices I made and why, and it teaches me something about my habits and prejudices. For example, I’ll notice that it benefits the music if I do less, or if I keep going with something that I might think is not entertaining enough while I do it. Or it’ll make me listen even more closely to the sounds we are all actually making. When we perform, we always take in account the room, the floor, the audience and the situation. This inspires our performance. Last year we recorded an album, Gol Variations, in Gol Stave Church, where the wooden floor is very, very old and has great tonality and textures. It was tempting to go back there for this recording, but it is more in the spirit of this trio to search for new challenges. That’s why I loved the idea of recording at Emanuel Vigeland Museum, a stone mausoleum with a reverb of about 15 seconds. 

It felt like painting with aquarelle and too much water as opposed to crayons. I felt like I could hear how the sound traveled away from us, and how it came back. At some point Vegar sang one note and then another, and they mixed. My own sound seemed to be different where I heard it as opposed to from where someone else heard it. When you do something, it’s going to ring out for a long time. You can’t hide anything, and it’s like it forces you to commit even more to your choices. Everything bleeds into each other, unless you wait for 15 seconds for the reverb to be done. This creates a whole new timing between us when we improvise. It magnifies the moment of the (re-)action, overlap, interaction, start and finish. We tended to take more turns, instead of playing all three. We stayed close to each other, and surprisingly enough it was possible to play in time / groove together. Whenever I moved further away it was so much harder to connect the timing. 

Regular tap shoes with metal or wooden taps on a marble floor created a hard, high sound, which seemed to shoot out in space much faster than I was used to. Soft shoes sounded more like normal shoes in a museum or something. I tested a pair of shoes that had metal taps on the heels but none under the toes, thinking that that would give me both options at once. But that didn’t work. 

We recorded several improvised tracks, and I’m sure some of the other recordings will come out in some format some day. The recording has not been edited at all. The one I chose for this album is the one where we played the most recklessly, including the chairs of the room in our music. When these wooden chairs are moved around on that marble floor they create something that sounds like a trumpet sound. Of course, the title Chair Variations is a pointer to our first album Gol Variations.

There was a distinct smell, from the mural paintings that cover the walls from top to bottom. There was a marble stone floor, with some dirt and sand. This produced an extremely harsh and unpredictable sound, which totally interrupted and distracted my dancing. I brought a swiffer and made sure there was no grain of sand left on the marble floor. 

We were there for two days. Especially after the first day I felt so weird when I went home on my bike. It was almost like being carsick. It was so intense to play in that room, almost like we were in some kind of audible illusion.


Improvised by One Small Step: Roger Arntzen (double bass), Vegar Vårdal (fiddle, voice, chair) and Janne Eraker (tap dance with soft shoes, loose taps, chair, water container, metal)
Recorded by Audun Strype at the Emanuel Vigeland Museum
Mixed by Audun Strype
Video by Morten Minothi Kristiansen
​Cover art by Daan Botlek​
About One Small Step, the trio of Roger Arntzen, Vegar Vårdal and Janne Eraker
This trio has been working with tap dance as percussion in music for several years, and released its first album Gol Variations on Clean Feed Records in 2022. With a wide-ranging background, One Small Step plays with minimal music, Norwegian folk music, jazz, and, of course, all kinds of rhythms. They challenge each other in their interaction, and launch into musical escapades that consist of textures, tonalities, imaginative ideas and exhaustive stretches. Roger Arntzen is a double bass player from In the Country, Trail of Souls, Ballrogg and Chrome Hill. Fiddler and folk dancer Vegar Vårdal has roots deep in the Gudbrandsdal, but travels around the world with his work and has even played with Camille Norment Trio at the Venice Biennale!
Picture
Picture
Picture

Single nr. 1: Chulas Fronteras, with Knut Reiersrud

1/3/2023

 
Since I saw Knut Reiersrud performing on national TV in the 90’s, I’ve been a fan. I love the way he plays the blues, and how he blends it with other folk music genres. Needless to say, I’m totally honoured that he said yes to record a tune with me for this album. Knut is a master, and I just tried to catch up and do my best next to him. 

We met about a year in advance to practice, and he suggested this 5/4 groove. Knut used his pedals and put a couple of layers on top of it, while I was improvising some swing grooves. When we met again a week before recording we practiced this, and talked about how we would record it. His approach was that we would record the bassline first, then record other parts that would be added on top. This was a completely new way to make a tune for me, and it took me a little while to understand exactly what he meant.

I took the practice recording with me in my studio and searched for ways to play the 5/4 groove in a complementing way. My focus was mainly to get a good flow and a nice swing feel in the dancing. On days where I was more relaxed I managed this better, and on days where I was stressed or impatient it was harder to sit in the relaxed groove. I did not at all focus on any kind of soloing. This song seemed like a steady ride to me, going in on and on. On the day of recording I was constantly in a weird state of being a little bit starstruck, enjoying the music a lot, trying to stay sharp and focused in what I was doing, while also wondering what we were actually doing. Knut is a seasoned pro, of course, and sort of just directed me (and Audun) through it. He seemed to have a pretty good idea of where this song was heading. 

First he recorded the bassline for about 2 minutes. He did this while hearing a click on his headset, to make sure that it would be easy to combine, cut and paste later. Then he added a second layer to the bassline. Audun quadrupled the length of this so that we had 8 minutes, and I was asked to do whatever I wanted with this playing in my ear. So, there I was, tap dancing for two rounds of 8 minutes in this big church, while Knut, Audun and Morten were waiting and listening. We concluded that there were parts in there that we could use for the tune. Then we recorded some shorter parts, again with a click. Knut surprisingly brought out a fiddle, and made a beautiful part for the end. I tried to figure out how I could contribute in the best way, and tested out a sequence on the church floor, which I thought was way too brutal-sounding. After hearing the bits we had made again I realized that what I really wanted to hear was the sound of bare feet on the sand. All this time Knut was super supportive, and I felt that I could trust his opinion. 

We met again in Audun’s studio some time later, and there we cut and pasted the bits together. Knut suggested the title Chulas Fronteras, which means Beautiful Borders.

Performed by Knut Reiersrud (guitar, fiddle) and
​Janne Eraker (tap dance with regular tap shoes, tap shoes with wooden taps and with bare feet on sand)

Composed by Knut Reiersrud and Janne Eraker
Recorded by Audun Strype at Kulturkirken Jakob
Mixed by Audun Strype, Janne Eraker and Knut Reiersrud
Video by Morten Minothi Kristiansen
​Cover art by Daan Botlek​
About Knut Reiersrud
Knut Reiersrud is a Norwegian blues guitarist. His work also incorporates elements of Norwegian traditional music and African music. Reiersrud has recorded and played with David Lindley, the Blind Boys Of Alabama, Rickie Lee Jones, Nina Hagen and Norwegian church organist Iver Kleive. In over 40 years he has played his guitars on countless stages and mesmerized the audience all around the world. King Harald can be quoted; he had never seen anyone disappear into his instrument like Reiersrud. President Tabu Mbeki, at the very same concert, even offered him a South African passport, just to get one more song!

Sound statement

11/23/2022

 
​In the week of mixing and mastering at Strype Audio I got so used to listening to the music on a great sound system that I started to assume that this was normal. But then, when I came home and played the same tracks on my Harman Kardon bluetooth speaker I was shocked how different the music sounded. It seemed like half the tap sounds were not coming through at all, and the ones that were had much less texture, tonality and clarity than I had gotten used to. Similarly, some of the musicians in the project had heard the recorded music on their phone speakers or on other equipment and were positively surprised how much better it sounded in the studio when we heard it over Strypes speakers. 

Of course we know that there are good and bad quality sound systems. But when we listen to music we already know, and instruments we already know, we can sort of filter the bad sound and know what it really sounds like, approximately. But the tap sound is not a sound that most people know as anything more than click clacks and noise. So, when they listen to a recording with tap and guitar on a bad speaker, and the tap sound is bad, they don’t even know that that is the case. To paraphrase David Lynch: “People watch a movie on their phone and think they have experienced the film, but sadly that’s not the case at all!”

Now this project is all about making the effort, spending much time and money, and working with experts, to make recordings that do the tap sound justice. All aspects are considered and used to the maximum potential: What does the tap dance sound contribute in each specific collaboration and what does that mean for my tap dance vocabulary, musical role and rhythmical responsibility, how do we use the specific location and sound of the room as well as possible, which microphones, boards, shoes work best, and then how is it mixed and mastered in the studio? 
​
Each recording session was also filmed, and the documentary videos will be available after the vinyl is released. In the meantime very short teaser videos will hopefully make people want to go in and listen to the digital singles that are released online beforehand. It’s a very conscious decision to not release the videos of the recordings at the same time as the singles, because I want people to listen to the music before they see it. All of this to make it possible to really hear the tap dance, to perceive it as a part of the complete music. 

So, please, let yourself experience the music, in all its range and complexity, by listening to it on a better sound system or headphones!​
  • JANNE
  • ABOUT
  • WORK
  • Movements for Listening
  • ALBUM BLOG
  • DATES
  • PRESS