Something different for a Friday night from Christina Strandholdt, from Djursland in Denmark, who has recently released her second album ‘Mellemrum’.
Her debut album concerned being a young cancer survivor while ‘Mellemrum’ (it translates as ‘Space’) focuses on the need to find pauses in a hectic, fearful, and demanding world, one that seems to get more manic with every passing day.
The way she describes her music is that “the genre is a form of neoclassical poetic minimalism and consists of improvised piano pieces created in the small pauses in everyday life, which since have been explored with organic and electronic sound layers as well as lyrics.”
As I don’t have access to the lyrics so can’t offer a translation my attention falls on the soothing music, just right after a hard day at the office and what is says about an individual and their locale.
A little research on Djursland tells me it is a peninsula to the northeast of Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, quite isolated, on the Kattegat sea channel between Denmark and Sweden, that it is very scenic, has incredible beaches (I’ve often seen Denmark’s beaches from the air, you wouldn’t believe how many there are) and is famous for its ice cream.
All that matters because just as you write a successful novel about what you personally know about, so songwriters can craft a winning song out of their appreciation of where they live.
Whether or not Christina intended that in the sample track, ‘Gode Ven’ (‘Good friend’) we do not know. ‘Gode Ven’ is about being thankful to your body when it tells you to stop moving too fast. I know the feeling.
And I doubt there is much rushing about in Djursland. Just the gentle bobbing of boats on the water, and gulls swooping to pick up bits of food where they can find them.
I could believe she wrote it on a whim, while sat on a bench taking all this in. It blends piano, synths and choral voices in perfect harmony.
It really should be part of the area’s tourist department video.
There are 10 tracks on ‘Mellemrum’ but here’s the thing, each is duplicated on a second side with piano-only versions.
What more could anyone ask for?
Oh and another thing. She plays two concerts at festivals in August, one of them with our old mate Slagger Lund. See socials for dates etc.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/c.strandholdt
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christinastrandholdt/
