Qvales Ensamble // Bohem // CD

QVALES ENSEMBLE: Bohem (Bohemian) 

After listening to qvales ensemble's new album "Bohem", you will understand that Frode Qvale has two hearts. One inner and one innermost. The inner heart is the regular heart. The one with valves and blood pumping through. The innermost heart is his Bohemian heart. This is where he writes about injustice and explores his pain. Where he breaks his bread and reads about freedom and philosophy. This is where his Bohemian side lives. In real life Frode Qvale lives in downtown Bergen. And in real life Frode Qvale is no Bohemian character. He faked his way to Bohemian status by having a temporary dependent relationship with the absinthe bottle while teaching Norwegian in lower secondary school, trying to survive the interminable final class on Friday with his sanity intact. 

Absinthe, the green fairy, would have worked better as a motif for Frode Qvale's ensemble's previous record, Grønn (Green). But on that record he inexplicably appeared with a yellow face on the cover. On the cover of his new record, Bohem, he appears dried out but hungry, in the style of Swedish actor Per Oscarsson when he starred in the film version of Knut Hamsun’s Sult (Hunger). The same cover also shows that the cover designer has desperately tried to remember the font used on the cover of Luciano Pavarotti's La Bohème. 

Now Frode is off the absinthe, instead habitually living a fashionable life in cafés only serving the latest in urban coffee drinks far removed from where coffee is harvested, where he in turn explores his internal pain, makes sad music of the comforting variety, and ponders what happened to the class set of Jonas Lie's collected works. It may have disappeared during a moment of clarity during his absinthe period. 

The Bohemians of the past saw it as their duty to drink absinthe and stumble from woman to woman, contracting hush-hush diseases before withering and dying (as opposed to Frode). But they also saw it as their duty to create art and music. Just like Qvale. After all, when all is said and done, it’s the music and not his absinthe period he will be remembered for. There may also be a Bohemian necessity in the fact that a person with such a bleak, dull and trivial background as a suburban teacher of Norwegian as Frode Qvale has feels compelled to create such well-played and lush music to survive. Where the absinthe ends, the music begins. 

This is a release by a respectable record company. But there is no way around the scandals; we must come to them in the end. Long after the journalists have lost interest. The stories are many. The verified facts few. And the truth hails from doubtful sources. We will probably never know the true reason behind the conflicts and fistfights that delayed this album. We will probably never know the terrible truth behind the YouTube video ("mor og datter danser" / mother and daughter dancing) the band made for the song "Ikkje sku meg ned" / Don't push me down). We will probably never know why an old lady of 77 was pushed aside in her own kitchen so an exhibitionist girl could make a dance video on YouTube. We will never know what musical-religious forces healed this poor woman who suddenly, wild with joy, discarding her walker, starts to dance. We will probably never know why she was so quickly pushed away. Is she still alive? We will probably never know what... 

Some final facts: 

qvales ensemble made their debut with the CD "Grønn" (Green) on KKV in 2004, and after a gap of too many years their second album is finally finished and again released on KKV with lyrics by Gunnar Roalkvam/Birthe Kadis and compositions by Frode Qvale. The album was actually finished in 2009, but immediately prior to mixing it the band decided it wasn’t good enough and they made a new one. The album was recorded in Bergen in the winter and spring of 2011 and has been mixed in Abbey Road Studios in London and elsewhere.

The lyrics are sung in a dialect from southwest Norway, and may perhaps be called folk song pop, or in the words of a reviewer of the previous album: Rocked circus jazz. 

Track list:

1. Ikkje sku meg ned

2. Trøstesang for ensomme sjeler

3. Sang til autoriteten

4. Bohem

5. Ta masken på

6. Kveldens siste

7. Sprudledamer

8. Barbeint på brostein

9. Retzina og vann 

10. Eg var ein vandrar, eg