Last spring, while driving down an Arizona highway searching for an alt-rock radio station, I heard a woman’s voice cry out across the airwaves, as if in primeval prayer. A guitar answered, then dropped into a thick growl of minor chords while the melody swelled with the lyrics, before the whole thing sank into the depths of a ten-ton unison riff. My god, I thought, does Arizona have a DJ who’s into Nordic roots music? No, the song was by Melissa auf der Mar, former bassist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins. Which means that in my mid-forties I’m becoming a headbanger. Or is it metalhead? Anyway, I couldn’t be happier.
My infatuation with loud, primal, dirge-like music started back in 1999 with Hedningarna, one of the first Swedish groups to fuse traditional Scandinavian tunes with rock as part of a movement throughout Scandinavia. Performing live in Minneapolis to a dance piece by local choreographer Joe Chvala, the band offered up an otherworldly mix of lush, heavy instrumentation and spectral melodies. The long notes of ancient instruments like the Hardanger fiddle, the hurdy-gurdy, and the Swedish bagpipes resonated at my core. And the singers, two Finnish women, were Valkyries, their clear voices slicing like shards of glass through the battle fray, lifting every note as if it were a dead warrior being spirited to Valhalla.
This music was nothing less than transporting. It took me to some kind of preconscious state: a place of vocalization, not vocabulary, where emotion flashes raw and unadulterated by memory or sentiment, and where instinct isn’t an impulse but a mode of survival. The kind of world created by William T. Vollman in his mythical Viking travelogue, The Ice-Shirt, populated by marauders who revel in, then lose, their ability to don the bear serk (literally, a bear shirt or skin), which makes them invincible in battle. And that was just the music. Hedningarna’s lyrics relate medieval tales of warrior kings and defiant women, of curses and enchantments, loyalties and grudges, of unfettered sensuality; they conjure a time when the boundaries between human and animal could dissolve with results both terrifying and exhilarating.
I had gone to see Chvala, one of my favorite choreographers, but in the process gained a new musical obsession. Chvala and Hedningarna were part of the first Nordic Roots Festival in 1999. Organized by NorthSide Records, a Minneapolis-based imprint that distributes Nordic roots music throughout the United States, the festival is now in its sixth year and runs September 17-19 at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis.
Through the past five festivals, and at other concerts over the years, I’ve become part of a local community intent on exploring the spectrum of Nordic roots music, which has found a hardcore fan base here in the Twin Cities. Its sounds include the goddess-infused ethereality of Gjallarhorn, named for Heimdal’s horn, used to transmit messages between the gods and humans; the disquieting yoiking of Sami singer Wimme; and the Hendrix-like delirium of Hoven Droven (which translates as “helter skelter”).
Garmarna, named for the dogs that guard the gates of Norse hell, is one group that consistently sells out here. The band’s work evokes a stark, terrifying beauty as electronic instrumentation whips primal grooves around singer Emma Härdelin. The feminine eye at the center of a testosterone storm, her voice pierces the music’s dirges of lamentation and grief, as riveting as her stage presence is calm. She brings to mind the Danish/Inuit title character of Peter Høeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow: She is urbane, intelligent, and self-possessed, yet governed by fierce aboriginal intuition.
While those groups have been fixtures at previous festivals, this year two Swedish favorites are headlining: Väsen (an acoustic trio whose name means “essence” or “spirit”) and Harv (“to dig deep”). Väsen concerts are a religious experience, the group’s earthy melodies and supple rhythms conjuring an incomparably joyous heartache; the two young men in Harv play self-described “bad fiddles” and “Harv-ify” every traditional tune they encounter, turning the Swedish three-beat polska and its relative, the Norwegian pols, into music as jagged and stunning as lightning.
How is it that a half-Scandinavian woman raised on Baroque music and the Bee Gees can listen to Garmarna’s Vengeance or the compilation CD Wizard Women of the North and feel a visceral connection to the soundtrack of her inner life? A couple of people in town have some pretty good ideas about that. “Nordic roots music just has this resonance,” says Bill Snyder, a critic who writes about Nordic music for such publications as Sing Out. “People say they feel like they have this music in their bones, or that they’ve always known it, or that it’s immediately familiar to them.”
It’s possible that the music’s mythic and medieval qualities—in lyrics, tunes, and instruments—contribute to that feeling. “Most of it has ancient roots in some way or another, even the modern compositions,” Snyder says. “If you believe in a collective unconscious, or that there are certain things in ritual that become part of humanity, then it makes sense that a lot of people have this visceral experience with the music.”
Snyder’s referring to archetypes: the rhythms, symbols, characters and stories that Carl Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell employed to explain ancient patterns of experience that constitute our shared human heritage. “People dying from broken hearts. Murders. Folk music themes, whether they’re Celtic, Nordic, or Anglo-American, are very basic,” Snyder says. “It’s pretty bloody, often not happy. It’s about survival under harsh conditions. The specifics are dated, but these themes speak to a human condition—needs, desires, love—that hasn’t changed for thousands of years.”
Then there are the instruments used by Nordic roots groups—hurdy gurdy, nyckelharpa, Hardanger fiddle, Swedish bagpipes, and even the didgeridoo from Gjallarhorn’s ensemble—that strike a chord within the human psyche. “All of these are drone instruments, which create single notes that are omnipresent,” says Rob Simonds, who founded and runs the NorthSide label. Take the Hardanger fiddle and nyckelharpa. “They have strings that only exist to resonate. You don’t bow them, but they produce a subtle noise with an eerie quality, a natural reverb. Basically the resonance creates the ever-present drone of harmonics.”
So are those drones like the hum of a tuning fork pitched to the thrumming strands of our DNA? “Now we’re getting into an area in which I don’t have any expertise,” Simonds says, laughing. “But there’s a whole field of study called psychoacoustics that focuses on how people are affected by different harmonic structures and keys.” Aha. Maybe that’s the key to our insatiable appetite for Harv’s “bad fiddling.” Right, Simonds explains: “Bad fiddling refers to melodies and harmonic structure. Harv likes to play these ‘blue notes’ that are quarter tones—not what we’re used to in mainstream Western music. And, well, it does weird stuff to you.”
For another example, there’s the ever-present, polyrhythmic polska, the basis for a lot of Nordic roots music. This traditional dance is similar to a polka in that it has three beats, but as Simonds tells it, the polska’s rhythm more closely echoes the human heartbeat—and depending on which part of Sweden the musicians hail from, the first beat might be quick or long, with lots of “messing around with the space between the beats.”
As if medieval lyrics, harmonic drone, and polyrhythmic intensity aren’t enough, those groups with female singers often add to the mix Swedish kulning—the impossibly high-pitched calf-calling that causes the hair on the back of your neck to rise. On top of that, electric instrumentation and a dose of American influence also play roles in creating the Nordic roots sound. For instance, Simonds describes Stefan Brisland-Ferner, who does most of the arranging and composition for Garmarna (scheduled to play the Cedar in fall 2005), as a “studio geek” who grew up listening to Kraftwerk and David Bowie. Kjell-Erick Eriksson, Hoven Droven’s lead fiddler, is a well-known folk musician who, “when growing up, had a poster of some old Swedish fiddle player on one wall, and on the other, AC/DC and Kiss,” claims Simonds. Hedningarna (“heathens”) is among the oldest of the Nordic roots bands. The movement’s genesis lies within the folk revival of the late 1960s and seventies that started in America and then swept the world—an influence that’s reflected in much of the Nordic region’s lush, shamanistic, hard-rock approach to traditional music.
Both Simonds and Snyder emphasize that Nordic roots musicians consider themselves folk musicians, whether they’re playing new or ancient tunes, whether their sound is electronic or acoustic. “They think of themselves as doing the same thing folk artists have always done: taking the indigenous music of their country and imprinting it with their own personal slant,” Simonds says.
At a Nordic roots concert, age, race, social status, and cultural background are irrelevant. During a Garmarna concert once, I talked to two preteen boys from Duluth who eagerly explained that they discovered the music through their parents. I’ve chatted with an out-of-town grandmother cruising last year’s festival with her adult daughter. And there’s the night I found myself dancing between two unlikely partners—a leather-clad biker with a shaved head and piercings, and a punked-out kid in a black T-shirt and jeans. The three of us thrashed together, turning toward each other to howl with the delirious invincibility of berserkers.
If there’s a wild side at these concerts, there’s also nothing dangerous. The audience is unfailingly a peaceable group, assembled to revel in the music. “These bands have a remarkable way of bringing very diverse people together. This isn’t lost on these musicians,” Snyder says. It is, of course, not just the music, but the musicians themselves—unpretentious, devoid of ego, and downright fun—that inspire the outpouring of emotion and camaraderie during their live performances.
“It’s part of the Scandinavian cultural ethic that there’s just not much ego involved,” says Simonds. “The musicians really don’t think of putting themselves first as a general rule, they think of the group first. When these bands perform, it’s an ensemble psychology.” Conversely, he adds, “the audience is so tuned in and so with the musicians every step of the way, you feel as if there’s no wall at all.”
In other words, magic happens. The music is the portal through which to enter blood memory and swim back to ancient, raw, and irrefutable truths that lie far beyond our highly mediated, aggressively processed culture. It’s the incantation by which we put on our bear serks and for a couple of soul-satisfying, sweat-drenched hours, shapeshift into a community of dancing warriors at one with each other and the music.
Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul writer.
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