It’s not often the first track of a CD leaps out and smacks you in the head with the pure subtlety of the musician’s technique. However, that is exactly what happened to me when I recently played Mark Gilston’s Troll Road for the first time. Troll Road features Swedish and Norwegian "spelsman" music played in traditional style with Gilston on English concertina and mountain dulcimer and guest musician, Tom Gibney, on fiddle. A few tracks feature Gilston alone on the dulcimer, and your ear would swear there has to be another instrument in there somewhere! The merriment in the dulcimer tracks set my toes tapping, and made me very sorry I didn’t try harder to learn how to dance the hambo when I was a kid. But of primary interest to folk concertinists are the tracks where Gilston trots out his baritone Wheatstone (ca. 1910-1920) giving a haunting, dark-forest twist to the tunes, especially the aforementioned first track, Gänglät efter Olle Gustafson-Solne. The title track is also excellent. For a listener familiar with the mental images of cheerful pubs and ruddy faces gathered around cottage hearths that Irish and English music conjures up, Gilston’s concertina-playing instead takes you to dark forests and lost, snow-drift nights. In some cases, his playing echoes organ music, although there is nothing particularly church-like about it. If you’re looking to expand your concertina CD collection beyond the borders of England or Ireland, Troll Road would be an excellent place to start.