When’s the last time you heard something truly whimsical? It may very well be possible to view live shots of Paris over electronic lines, but how long has it been since you experienced a purely innocent sensory input? If the answer is long in coming, you may find remedy in Joel Danell’s latest output.
Danell isn’t the only artist of this sort to have exposed his raw artistic output to the world for judgment in recent years. Peter Broderick and Keith Keniff (a.k.a. Helios and Goldmund) have been casting pearls upon us swine for a good portion of the last decade. The result is a decidedly hungry audience for even the less finished creative avenues of artists like the aforementioned. Musette respects this tradition, even embracing it down to the charming track titles consisting simply of dates. These dates represent Danell’s cheek-pinchingly lovable instrumental musings—utilizing only an antique piano along with occasional whistling, violin, and dobro.
The songs themselves seem to flow by alongside the artist in his home of Grimsta, Sweden. As in life itself, no one date stands out, but when taken together, they compose an experience which carries a full range of emotional subtleties. The finger-picked acoustic base and dark-tinged whistling that stand out on “23 Oktober” translate a feeling felt primarily on that date; nothing else can be said. A simple piano added to a chorus of birds chirping stands out on “14 April” as both melancholic and hopeful. The joy of Datum is its subtle ability to bring the listener along on a tour of the artist’s heartstrings that lasted the better part of a year and can be digested within the better part of an hour. A simple, happy-go-lucky piano repeat on “18 Juli” immediately clears any clouds from “14 April” and leads delightfully into the pleasantries of the remainder of Danell’s album.
The album overall feels (and “feels” is a strikingly relevant term) as though the characters in The Wizard of Oz documented their story with sound rather than film. Danell coyly attempts to break up his journey by placing his dates randomly about the album, but a manual override that gathers dates together by month provides a more plunging look into his life than even he may have intended. Those dates denoted as “Oktober” share a similar group of instruments and a forlornly optimistic mood. Those labeled “Juni” and “Juli” universally showcase the playful and loving mental wanderings of an artist in the midst of a European summer. In this way Musette as a project does not merely reveal the technical proficiency of an artist at play. It also gives an intimate look into the soul of a man merely creating to share. As Focillon once said, “Hands are almost living beings… The hand means action: it grasps, it creates, at times it would seem even to think.” As with other modern artists, we are lucky to have the hands of Joel Danell.
-Brendan Kraft