Label: ECM Records, 2021

Personnel - Sinikka Langeland: kantele, vocals.

I’m completely captivated by the entrancing, meditative music of the Norwegian folksinger and kantele player Sinikka Langeland. Having collaborated with known jazz personalities in the past - including the bassist Anders Jormin, trumpeter Arve Henriksen and saxophonist Trygve Seim - Langeland goes solo on Wolf Rune, her sixth outing on the ECM Records.

Here, she plays three different kantele instruments (a zither-family table-harp with rich tones), being more rooted in the incantatory and poetic tales of the Finnskogen folklore tradition than in jazz. Yet, a contemporary feel inundates these 12 tracks made of rune songs, folk hymns and dances, and mystic religious chants. Each of them works its own magic, generating a marvel of sounds that search for the elemental beauty in nature.

Langeland’s impeccable voice and the special 39-string concert kantele can be heard on the hypnotic “Row My Ocean”, in which she sings a text by contemporary Norwegian poet/playwright Jon Fosse; the tranquil “The Eye of the Blue Whale”, whose active low notes sustain the glowing upper sweeps and her own lyrics; “When I Was a Forest”, a mysterious and liturgical chant articulated with the words of the 13th-century mystic/philosopher Meister Eckhart; and “Don’t Come to Me With the Entire Truth”, where the 1961 poem of the same name by Olav H. Hauge soars above the bucolic nature of the music.

On the stunning “Winter Rune”, Langeland adds the 5-string kantele to the concert one, making a case for an ambient spaciousness that develops into occasional abstract textures that she sculpts (briefly using the bow) and molds with quill-plucked grace. When her voice is embedded in the last section, it comes with a pleasurably shivering sensation.

Configured like a lullaby-ish folk pop tune, the traditional “Polsdance From Finnskogen” merges the ancient and the contemporary, while “The Girl in the Headlands” is a trollspringar (Norwegian folk dance) carrying grace and emotion. The record ends with the title cut, a 1808 rune song wrapped in mythology and mysticism.

Conjuring incantatory landscapes and moods, this is a record of immense beauty that touches the heart and quiets the mind.