Tag: Northern Fever

Discover Some New Nordic Folk With Me – Two Winters, One Midnight Sun

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Several years ago, I experienced what I thought was a major depressive episode, but which turned out to be neurodivergent burnout. My nervous system was shattered, making any sort of stimulation unbearable. When I tried to listen to music, I’d physically recoil, like Nosferatu in a sunbeam, and need to turn it off.  

Almost overnight, creating and consuming art became impossible. I lost the ability to read, to write, to form coherent sentences. My world became so small it was like I barely existed. This deprivation made for the most terrifying time of my life.

I remember slamming my hands against my ears a few seconds into a Wardruna track. Warduna! A band whose live performance had left me sobbing and prompted the purchase of a one-way ticket to Norway.

When I was able to listen to music again, I tried to discover what I’d missed, but was quickly overwhelmed and returned to what was familiar. Curiosity is in my makeup though, and before too long, I was tentatively exploring the ever-rising ocean of musical releases.

It’s been difficult to accept that my capacity isn’t what it used to be, and I get easily frustrated by the sifting required to find something precious. Also, since burning out, it’s been more difficult to listen to music at times when I used to without issue. For instance, I often listened to music while writing, but nowadays mostly need silence. I’m still figuring out how to ‘be in the world’ as a late diagnosed neurodivergent, and what my capacity for everything, including music, looks like.

It’s usually right before going to bed, when I feel the urge to discover something new. Earlier this week, I put Nordic Folk into the Bandcamp search and opened new tab after new tab for promising projects, vowing each I’d give them my attention over the coming days.

But I needed quieter days than I’d thought this week. When I did listen to music, I found myself returning to Two Winters, One Midnight Sun by Triveni, a project of Belgian composer and accordionist Barbara Eva Ardenois. Listening to this shimmering soundscape unearthed from Bandcamp’s Nordic Folk hoard reunited me with something I hadn’t felt in ages – bliss.

In case anyone is wondering, at this moment in time, my three favourite tracks on the album are Call of the High Plains, Twilight and Sirkat.

On her Bandcamp page Ardenois writes: My journey through the Nordic countries began in the autumn of 2021. Over the following seasons, I lived and travelled across Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, studying traditional music as part of the Nordic Master in Folk Music.

The sound of the kantele, the vast Nordic landscapes, and the stillness of nature left a lasting impression on me. Through dark winters and luminous summer nights, I shaped my musical world where light sparks as a symbol of hope.

In 2023, I created Triveni—named after the confluence of three rivers. In this project, I weave elements of Swedish shepherd music, Karelian kantele improvisations and contemporary classical music, gently blending field recordings and subtle electronics.

My Dreamy Folk Flow draws sonic landscapes for the quiet hours—when light returns or fades—welcoming you to slow down, connect and wonder.

This album is co-created with my two dear friends and fellow musicians, Ingrid Rodebjer (Sweden) and Hanna Ryynänen (Finland). Their improvisations and deep roots in traditional music bring new colours and atmospheric layers to these cross-cultural soundscapes. – Barbara Eva Ardenois

Ronja the Robber’s Daughter – The Enduring Spell of a Book Cover

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“This is my forest. I know every stone and every root. No one can frighten me here.”

Ronja The Robber’s Daughter, Astrid Lindgren

Growing up, much of my time was spent in a centuries-old farmhouse in a moorland valley where my friend Annie lived. Outside her bedroom was a narrow landing, most of it taken up by a bookcase we’d need to shimmy past to get in and out. The shelves were so tightly packed, books would need to be prised free.

It was rare that I passed this bookcase without tugging out one book in particular – Ronja the Robber’s Daughter by Astrid Lindgren which had been read to my class at school. Usually, I wouldn’t even open the book, but just study the cover, especially the figure in the foreground: a wild-haired, barefooted Ronja, steadfast on a thin forest trail. Fearless and nature-led, she embodied everything I wanted to be.

For what was to be her final novel, (after Ronja, Lindgren shifted her focus to picture books) Lindgren drew inspiration from her densely forested home region of Småland, along with Thoreau’s Walden. City-based at the time, Lindgren ached for the forest and was inspired by Thoreau’s departure from society to lead a solitary, simple life in the woods.

Originally published in Sweden in 1981 as Ronja rövardotter and in English in 1983, the translated edition (unnecessarily) changed the spelling of Ronja to Ronia and featured a different cover by prolific children’s book illustrator Trina Schart Hyman.

I’ve always wondered why this cover had such a lasting impression, and I figure it may have something to do with Hyman’s art technique, which involved extensive layering. She began with a pencil drawing, then built layers using India ink and diluted acrylic. The result is a mesmeric, fabled atmosphere that enchants me to this day.

Misty Mountains – Photos Shot From The Road In Iceland

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For a few years, I had a partner who lived in Akranes, a small port town about a forty-minute drive from Reykjavík. The construction of the Hvalfjörður Tunnel (at 70 million USD, this 5.770-kilometre subsea tunnel cost less than Kristi Noem’s ad campaign) reduced travel time by a hefty forty-five minutes when it was completed in 1998.

The road which we’d travel, sometimes multiple times a day, passes mountain ranges so epic, so worthy of worship, that I felt I was betraying the landscape itself by not summiting the peaks.

My favourite time to see the mountains was on misty days. ‘THE MOUNTAINS, THE MOUNTAINS! LOOK AT THE MIST IN THE MOUNTAINS!’ I’d yell at my partner, head whipping from the window to my partner back to the window again, aghast. ‘I can’t look, I’m driving,’ he’d patiently remind me. Abandoned by rationality, I’d forget he couldn’t appreciate the views like I, the fortunate passenger princess, could.

I’ve Been Thinking About A Jawbone Horse I Saw In Iceland

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It’s just over a year since I first visited Skógar Museum in Iceland, and I’ve been thinking about one of my favourite artefacts (out of the fifteen thousand residing there) – a toy ‘horse’ made from a sheep’s jawbone by the museum’s founder, Þórður Tómasson. There’s probably not much to know about the ‘horse’; however, I’m one of those highly annoying people who feed on minute, possibly inconsequential details about things I get attached to.

In her fantastic (although sometimes challenging to get along with) book The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collections of Iceland, A. Kendra Greene writes lyrically about ‘Iceland’s biggest museum outside of Reykjavik,’ calling it ‘…a museum of old rituals, of daily chores, of things to do and things undone. This is a museum of kinship, of who we are by way of who’ve we’ve been.’

Something I appreciate about the museum, and which Greene highlighted, is that it’s ‘without sequence…you can start anywhere.’ I recall my first trip and can grin to myself, right now, as I curl over my laptop, at the memory of flitting around, bedazzled and delighted by all the curious things and stuff left behind by Icelanders of another time.

Greene writes about meeting the then 95-year-old Tómasson, but apparently, ‘the language yawned‘ between them, and there was little to say, which I found a bit sad. I was strangely affected to learn of the passing of a man I’d never met and whose museum I visited first the first time two years after his death (he died in 2022 at the age of 100). I would have loved to have met him, even just to shake his hand and say ‘I’m not often happy, but what you have built here has made me very, very happy, especially the jawbone horse.’

A Delightfully Diabolical Church Ceiling At Borås Museum

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I recently visited Borås Museum with a friend, but due to missed buses and a long overdue catch-up (seven years overdue) in the museum café, we had only minutes to zip around before it closed.

My friend was especially eager to look inside Ramnakyrken. This quint red church had originally stood in Kinnarumma, a village about 15 kilometres from Borås. It was dismantled in 1912 and rebuilt in its current location in 1914. However, our time was up, and the church doors had been locked. An especially considerate museum employee took pity on us and offered to open the church, which she did with a key so gigantic I was, for a moment, convinced it was fake.

While the church was interesting, I kept my camera switched off, that was until we were making our way back out and I looked up. There was only time to snap a few shots of impressively vibrant demons before ducking back outside.  

The ceiling was originally painted, with lesser diabolical depictions, in 1706 by Nicklas Berg. It was painted over (rude) between 1752 and 1753 by a man called Ditlof Ross, though you can still make out ‘echoes’ of Berg’s original work. The ceiling was whitewashed in 1869-70 during a restoration (I’d love to know who ordered that job); however, in 1930, when the church was re-consecrated due to a need for additional church spaces in Borås, the paintings were uncovered and restored. It’s been a popular church for weddings and baptisms ever since. Are you also wondering how many children have been traumatised over the years by innocently looking upwards and making eye contact with these decorative servants of Satan?