Review of Ice and Longboats: Ancient Music of Scandinavia,
[speculatively reconstructed Viking music]
Kate Molleson writes: There is Viking graffiti etched into the stones of Maeshowe on Orkney: “Thorfir woz ere”, it declares, in effect - evidence of cheeky warriors sheltering in the ancient burial place around Christmas, 1153. That runic equivalent of a latterday cock-and-balls always struck me as whimsical because it’s usually so hard to imagine Vikings having anything much resembling fun. Did they goof around? Did they sing and dance? This meticulously researched album from Sweden’s Ensemble Mare Balticum imagines the instruments Vikings played and the voices they sang with, opening with an eerily plain little tune on medieval bone recorder and progressing through staunch ritual numbers for lyres and frame drums to lush polyphonic hymns in praise of early Scandinavian Christian saints. The instrumentals are pretty dry, but the singing of Ute Goedecke and Aino Lund Lavoipierre is gorgeous: two pure and fulsome voices, beautifully matched.
More about this and the other European Music Archaeology Project CD releases in our Music thread (down the page a bit)
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