The Smoky Smirr o Rain

The air is filled with moisture as you gaze out over the shores of a Scottish loch, a Norwegian fjord or a Finnish lake: the smirr of the title, the fine rain connecting the music of Summers and Silvola, their Scottish and Finnish heritage and their Oslo home. Their music-making is so intuitive; they breathe as one as they send a gentle melody on its way through Baroque ornamentation, desert vibes, a subtle mid-West swagger, a blush of jazz, a mischievous reel, a wrong-footing polska. They have created and perfected a musical language all their own, embracing their backgrounds from folk, electro acoustic music, jazz, pop, early music as performers, contemporary composers and producers. Summers is a fiddle player with fierce determination, vision and the most seductive of sounds, while Silvola’s guitars never fail to weep with beauty and whose piano reveals a hidden magic. They are capable of the most heartbreaking of laments from the jaws of anguish and the deepest musical laughter and joy. Nature and homelands abound, from the chorus of birds in ‘Borrowed Days’ to the lure of Scottish and Finnish light in ‘Number 81’ and the sky of ‘Taivaankannen Halki’. The Smoky Smirr o Rain is beyond exquisite.