There is no band called Spelemenn frå Agder. The name simply means fiddlers from Agder, and behind it stand nine men known, if at all, from archive tapes: Gunnar Austegard, Tarjei O. Liestøl, Lars Mjaaland, Magnus Øyslebø, Trygve Eftestøl, Emanuel Lauen, Ole G. Skeie, Ommund Tveiten and Otto Furholt. Ein gammel ein a´ farses gathers 99 archive recordings of them, made between 1920 and 1983 and never issued until ta:lik put the set out in April 2024, as a digital album and as a book with two CDs inside.
The book is the point, and Ånon Egeland is its author. Born in Oslo in 1954, he fell for the Hardanger fiddle at sixteen and went to Agder to learn it from the old guard: Andris Rysstad, Salve Austenå, Sigurd Fjeldstad. His 1977 debut with Per Midtstigen, I heitaste slåtten, won a Spellemannprisen, and he went on to teach for more than two decades at the folk culture department in Rauland. Less known is the fieldwork. In 1979 he borrowed a Tandberg reel-to-reel and started driving west, into what used to be Vest-Agder county, where the traditions had a reputation for being thin, or gone. One of those trips ended at Kvinlag school in 1983 with Trygve Eftestøl on the other side of the microphone.
The music argues against the reputation. This is not the Setesdal sound of drones and dragon-headed scrolls, though the hardingfele appears. Much of it is played on the ordinary fiddle, in springar, gangar, halling, waltz, reinlender and masurka rhythms, with a run of reels and trippar tunes and a waltz named for a hall in Arendal, and Egeland's thesis is that western Agder took its musical cues by a different route from the rest of inland Norway: not from the big fiddlers' markets at Kongsberg and Grundset, but from the nearest coastal town, and whatever came in by sea. You hear it in a repertoire that leans towards couple dances, and in playing that is plainer and more clipped than the sustained ringing most listeners associate with Norwegian fiddle.
Emanuel Lauen carries almost half the set, 43 tracks, and he is the reason to listen twice: unhurried, rhythmically sure, with a way of letting a phrase land a fraction late that no transcription fully captures. Which is why the book does both. It contains 125 tune transcriptions, biographies of the fiddlers with plenty of photographs, and a chapter on technique and style, and Egeland is candid about the choices involved in notating music never meant to be written down. The recordings, drawn largely from the Agder folk music archive, are there so the notation can be checked against living practice rather than replace it.
Egeland received the Egil Storbekken Music Prize in 2025 for his work with older folk instruments, and still records, lately in duo and trio with the Swedish fiddlers Mikael Marin and Mats Edén. This may be his most stubborn piece of work: a case for a tradition nobody was documenting, made with the only evidence that survives.
