At Leonardo's Basement, a DIY arts laboratory in south Minneapolis, summer is busy with vacationing youth groups looking to get their creative freak on. Last week, a gaggle of teens in a photography class bustled around the basement's four big rooms and hallway with cameras and darkroom duties, while another group learned the art of welding and metal sculpture, and still another learned how to make water fountains -- all to the live soundtrack of violins being played as beautifully as musical instruments can be played.
The music came courtesy of 20 fiddlers from Sweden and Minnesota, ages 13 to 23, known as the International Fiddle Conspiracy. Last week the fiddlers built a studio in Leonardo's Basement -- erecting soundproof walls, hooking up speakers, microphones and computers -- so they could record, mix and master a full-length CD.
The hot-off-the-burner discs will be available for sale when the group plays three sets Sunday afternoon at the Irish Fair of Minnesota, on St. Paul's Harriet Island.
"They just really wanted to do something that they could keep," said Kimberly Kelly-Sommer, director of the IFC's umbrella group, the Young Fiddlers Association of Minnesota. "The core group of eight have been together since 2005, and as the kids are getting older, some are going to college and it's getting harder to get them all together. So making a CD will be a great memory.
"It's lifetime friendships, it's the musical language they share. We've watched their English grow and they've watched us not get any better at Swedish. They all hang out and talk, and then they pick up their instruments and say, 'Let's play this.'"
Spend even a short amount of time with the fiddlers, and it's abundantly clear that they play for the sheer love of playing. When one picks up a fiddle, a few others hear the call and hover, bumblebee-like, over the flame-sound, and fall in.
"It's so much fun, and it's a tradition back home," said Malin Tornqvist, 22, who hails from Uppsala, Sweden. "Everyone plays the fiddle back home. If you meet five people, four will play fiddle. I'm so glad my dad forced me to do that when I was a little kid, because you see I am in America and playing the fiddle like I wanted to do."
The idea of recording the group came from Xander Nielsen, the 14-year-old son of Leonardo's program director, Tracy Nielsen. "It's just an incredible world for Xander to have been able to have stepped into," his mother said, "because they're an incredible group of people, and they're so ensconced in their music."
Xander has been fiddling since he was 9. "It's just so pretty," he said, his voice softening in reverence to the power and tradition of Swedish fiddle music. "There's lots more to it than the music, actually. It's just playing it, and being there."
More so than many other types of roots music, Swedish fiddling is robust and fragile, hypnotic and haunting. The deeply layered waltzes and polkas are steeped in ancient roots, dark loves and dramatic lives, all played with a wind-instrument-like delicacy that conjures the stuff of Narnia, Nottingham and other worlds. It is, in a word, transporting.
"I think it's reflecting the nature and landscape of our area," said Tornqvist. "We have a big lake, Lake Siljan, and around it is this mountain or hills. So it's really blue and then it's really green. It's really beautiful. So I think that when most of the tunes are written, they are sitting on a bench and looking at the nature. You can hear the feelings in the songs."
The tunes the fiddlers chose for their CD are, according to Tornqvist, "one year or 400 years old." And according to the group's director, teacher and spiritual leader, Margaretha Mattson, they might have more in common with the more boisterous Irish fiddle music than folks attending Irish Fair might think.
"You can dance to this music," said Mattson, who has "taught many, many students for many, many years" in Sweden. "It's a traditional music, and our grandparents grew up listening to this music and of course learned the tunes by heart.
"We have been to Ireland and played with Irish musicians, and that is why we have grown so close to them: happy music. Yeah. Now the [young fiddlers] have the music and they can make friends all over the world. It makes life so easy. If you can be friends with the music, you can't shoot people. It's peace and love. Yeah. Peace and love."
