Text and photography: Anne-Marie Forker
You just got back from an Australia / New Zealand tour. How was it?
It was beautiful. I’m still a bit jet lagged and bewildered in terms of what time of day it is and so on, but it was a wonderful trip. I met so many nice people and got to perform in beautiful places in front of so many people. It’s quite overwhelming, and to come to a new place and receive so much lovely feedback. It’s humbling in a way. It was great.
Did you play much from the new album?
We did three songs from the new album. I think new material should be carefully introduced. In a two hour set-list, that’s a nice way of introducing the songs and letting them find their place in the live setup.
What did you find inspiring about the concept of “Birna”, which means the she-bear in Old Norse?
Bears are fascinating creatures. What I discovered when I was researching was the history between man and bear, cultural history in our relations and traditions and so on. Wherever there are bears they seem to get a very central cultural role. You see it in folklore, in totemism, in star signs, many different things. I guess for me, what I realised is that a lot of these things felt very distant and didn’t really carry so much resonance today. The way we work with the past is that it kind of has to have a resonance in the contemporary time. So, for me, I decided at some point that I wanted the album to have a contemporary focus on the bear itself and its cultural significance. One of the most important factors is it’s cyclic being and the fact that it and your life rhythm sort of mirror each other. The rhythm of mother nature, which is also why I chose the female aspect of the bear, to tell that story even more clearly. We follow the bear or nature, we follow nature through this cycle of life and thriving, and de-generation and death, and reawakening and rebirth, through the eyes of the bear. There are many things about the bear that inspire me. This idea of the bear as a teacher that goes very far back in time. I think the bear can teach us or remind us about some things that even modern health sciences are talking more and more about, eat seasonally, eat locally, live according to the seasons. We humans tend to want to keep the same tempo all year round, eat the same things, do the same things, and it might not be so healthy. Of course, we can sleep all winter, that’s not the point, it’s more about being aware and adjusting your expectations, and just keeping it in the back of your mind is a step in the right direction. I felt it was important to give a voice to the wild because in many ways it’s an album about value and cost. If you don’t see the value of wild nature, then you won’t understand the cost of preserving it either, or having predators in our wildlife. The album seeks to address these things without bombarding you with opinions about what you should and should not do. It’s more about giving voice to something, shedding light on something, throwing out questions.
Speaking of the female aspects of the lyrics, I looked at the English lyric booklet, and it reads like poetry in places, especially “Sky Daughter”, for example “the pathless forest of the mind”. What inspired “Sky Daughter”?
The title is inspired from tradition and this global idea that the bear originates from the sky. They used to be celestial beings in a way, which are really fascinating myths. I think that’s also partly why they appear in star signs and folklore all over the planet as well, you always have bears and they seem to be significant. The song itself is very much about seeking connection.
The lyric ‘A change is coming’ (Eit skifte på veg) appears in both the title track and ‘Light to Earth’ (ljos til jord). What is the change?
Change is always coming, because we are cyclic beings. When you pay attention to these things, you will always feel when there is a change on the way. There are cycles of life and death that we are a part of, and we tend to forget that we are cyclic beings. According to us, it’s everything else that is cyclic and we’re not. Men have 24 hour cycles, whereas females have, like the moon cycle, the monthly cycle, and then we’re all part of a yearly cycle. We’re affected by the moon cycle, whether you’re male or female. What happens in nature here in the northern hemisphere, I like to have these these markers. At the winter solstice, that’s when summer is born so there you enter the life cycle, and then when it turns again in mid-summer, then you enter the death cycle. You feel it in your body. It does something to you, but there is also a potential there, and it’s a good occasion to let die what needs to die, and then you enter a new beginning. If you apply that to the world, if you know a little bit about history, that’s what you see in civilisations as well, how civilisation is born. It grows and then things go too far, then it dies and gives room for something new which is a kind of a comforting thought in in these turbulent times, knowing that the pendulum needs to swing quite far off before it’s going to turn. That’s how things move. This idea that we’re too small to make change, that’s a silly and dangerous thing. That’s the only thing we can control really.
The instrument you play on “Hibjørnen” (The Hibearnator) has a uniquely beautiful sound. Can you tell us more about the instrument?
It’s a lyre.
Sounds a bit like Irish.
It’s an instrument you had in Ireland as well. It’s like a small harp. It’s like the grandfather of the harp. It was also connected to the aristocracy, whereas pipes and fiddles were more for the common people. Harps, lyres and the poetry, that was more for the aristocracy. It’s an instrument type that you find in the Far East, Egypt, Greece, Northern Europe. It would be the most common string instrument as far as we know in the Viking period, for instance. The lyre in particular, I play on that song is a kravik-lyre, named after the place it was found, here in Norway. That’s based on a model from the late 1500s. The instrument goes back many thousands of years.
The powerful last track on your new album means ‘Healing Mountain’, and your record label, ByNorse, has a unique collaboration with the ‘Fire in the Mountains’ festival on indigenous land in the US, created to highlight the relationship between heavy music and mountain landscapes. Can you talk more about how that collaboration came about, and how it binds cultures together?
One thing is to perform in wonderful settings. It’s a sacred place for the Blackfoot tribe. It’s a festival that is in many ways more than a festival, where we want to leave a long-lasting positive footprint there, when the festival is over. For us it was also a good way of constructively standing with indigenous needs. That’s a big part of it, both the Blackfoot and other indigenous tribes. On that continent and many other places they have horrendously high suicide rates amongst young kids. We want to be part of constructively helping, not victimising, but more empowering, and potentially making a difference. That’s close to our heart. The people behind it are also really good people that we have been in touch with over the years. It’s a special festival in a stunningly beautiful area. It’s a national park. We will be also hosting some workshops and talks and ByNorse will be hosting some of the artists there, among others Mari Boine will join us. Getting involved in projects like this is something I’d like to do more of in the future as well. We want it to be like a cultural hub, predominantly for Nordic culture, but also other things, when it’s relevant.
Originally published in Norway Rock Magazine #1/2025
