Vandewolken, Linus
Het Vlier, Een Hommel Op Aarde (2x10")
What you are listening to on this album is the sound of a forgotten instrument. It has existed since the middle ages, but the earliest example still intact is from 1608. Once a staple in most households in the low countries, it is a true folk instrument, of the people, mainly played in the past by women who used their kitchen tables as a resonating surfaces to amplify and accompany traditional religious and secular tunes. Nowadays it seen rarely outside of museums in Brussels and other places you most likely have never heard of. It is not spectacular, its simplest version is just a long thin box with strings on top. Some of the strings are melody strings, which have frets placed underneath them, some are drone strings that have no frets. Traditionally it was strummed with a goose feather and notes were made by sliding a hard stick with a handle, from fret to fret on the melody strings leaving the drone strings ringing openly. The constant hum of the drones is where the name of the instrument comes from: bumblebee, which in Flemish, is a hommel. Linus Vandewolken does not play in a traditional way: he plucks, fingerpicks, taps and bows amplified flat wound electric guitar strings. He changes the notes with his fingers, metal sticks, bottlenecks steel tubes and the hard stick with a wooden handle, which has a special name: the vlier, which is a more local, Flemish Brabant, name of the instrument itself. He plays in a tuning to be in harmony with the tin whistles you hear from time to time and occasionally plays shakers he made by hand from branches, wire and bottle caps. The songs in this collection are not traditional either, they are inspired by cycling around Flanders and the landscape that surrounds Vandewolken's home in Niemandaal, a small village in the Pajottenland of Flanders, not far from the capital city, but isolated enough to not hear the constant hum of the highways.