In a nice green digipack with a beautiful booklet comes the new cd from the French band around Patrick Laforque and Patrice Roques. They play a large number of different stringed instruments, wind-instruments and percussions. Stille Volk plays a rather festive style of medieval music on this release, which is not so suprising because the album is devoted to the great God Pan, who represents the spirit of the wild things in all of us. Pan is the half man, half goat that to many Christians has come to represent the very image of the devil.
This is the third album from Stille Volk, after “Hataoma” and “Exuvies”, and I am positively surprised by the high quality of the songs, that were partly recorded in a chapel. You are taken along on a pleasant journey to the 12th century troubadours. On some songs texts and music from medieval sources are used, others are written by themselves. The energetic mixture of medieval and celtic elements works rather infectious, and it is a pleasure to listen to all the different instruments. Songs that are outstanding to me are ‘Le reveil de Pan’ and ‘Adoumestica una Terro’, that could even do well on ‘medieval dancefloors’…
