Jayson Lindh Second Carneval

Johann Strauss Junior’s second operetta, Der Carneval in Rom, premiered in 1873 only one year before Die Fledermaus, and while the music is enjoyable enough, with several nice tunes, there is little in the score to presage the gorilla blockbuster soon to come. For one thing, Strauss wrote the music in the more romantic style of light opera because the work was originally scheduled to be mounted at the Vienna court opera, a place of more serious mien than the Theater an der Wien, then the home of the comic-oriented Viennese operetta.

The Tolkien-inspired "Dreamsongs from Middle Earth" is the second product of the creative collaboration between the well-known Swedish musicians and composers Pär Lindh and Björn Johansson, both of whom are multi-instrumentalists. Their first joint musical experience took place in 1996 and was marked with the release of the (still, Tolkien-inspired) album "Bilbo". "Dreamsongs from Middle Earth" is an amazingly coherent recording, which, above all, is due to the fact that all the contents conform to a unified, nearly monolithic, compositional and stylistic conception. (Well, there are only wordless, separate and chorus, female vocals, so the album can be considered only a semi-concept work). There are no pauses between the tracks here, and each of the following ones provides the logical development of the music on its predecessor…

Hard to describe what’s going on in Triangulus and Björn J:son Lindh. The closest analog - would be what would happen if the Alan Parson’s Project relocated to the island of Majorca and replaced their members with Swedish electro-acoustic minimalists. Imagine a very math-y (complex, musical time signatures galore) version of Balearic music that’s as interested in taking you on a tropical journey as it is into not completely shaking off its progressive Scandinavian experimental heritage. Because that’s basically what it is. A mix of Triangulus’ minimal prog style with the late Björn J:son Lindh’s ambient flute-driven jazz-fusion creating a not so distant kin of Coste Apetrea‘s similar, ruminative ideas…

One of the people responsible for the Swedish prog revival of the '90s is Pär Lindh, a professional classical musician who grew up listening to prog rock in the '70s. Lindh was a member of the Royal Swedish Chamber Orchestra for four years before delving into progressive rock on a professional level, and he is a genuinely talented, sincere musician who does everything with a sense of integrity. Most people who bought this debut album probably did so because several members of the tragically short-lived but already legendary Swedish band Änglagård play on this album. Their performances are good, but anyone who expects this album to sound like Änglagård is likely to be sadly disappointed. …

After the Symphonic debacle of the late 70's and a bit more than a decade of a different approach to Progressive Rock called Neo Prog, Symphonic movement started to resurrect but this time not in UK or in the most faithful country to the classical sound as Italy, it was in Scandinavia and more specifically in the cold Sweden. Bands like Änglagård and The Flower Kings re-created the original spirit of the early 70's with great perfection and extreme care but people rarely mention Pär Lindh Project, not only one of the main re-creators of the early style but a band that went back in history for the search of their roots, most precisely to the late Gothic Religious music of the XII and XIV Centuries with his dark haunting organ solos without forgetting the sober influence of the Baroque period.