Wardruna: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Resonance and the Sound of Hibernation

The rhythms of a bear’s life echo the cycles of nature itself. In winter it hibernates, drifting into its slumber with the sounds of the singing ice and the snowy winds of the North, its heart slows beating with the pulse of the earth. The bear awakens in the spring, to the melodic drip of the snow melting off the trees, the rush of water and the echo of birdsong. This is the central focus of the immersive, emotive and powerful sixth album from WARDRUNA, Birna. Musically, the album brings together sounds that principal composer Einar Selvik has been hunting for years with the intricate atmospheres, soundscapes and melodies that WARDRUNA are known for. Spiritually, it is an ode to the totemic nature of the bear, and how we can repurpose this ancient knowledge to resonate in the modern day.

Sat in a chair draped with a black feathered cloak, surrounded by a variety of different kinds of lyres, drums and harps, Selvik begins the interview by delving into how the music of WARDRUNA comes into being and how the central theme governs his instrument selection. “It comes back to the creative concept that has followed WARDRUNA since its conception, and that is to let the theme be the major decisive factor in what the instruments I choose. Sometimes it’s not an obvious choice, and then it’s more intuitive thing I think. I go for the colours that are able to paint the picture I’m chasing. So, lots of trial and error. But sometimes it’s so clear to me how it looks or how it sounds that it’s easier to know what it is I’m chasing, and sometimes the themes are more abstract and you have to work a bit more to find its sound.”

This instinctive approach to composition allows the music of WARDRUNA to be present and in tune with the world around it. Selvik is always very scholarly and thoughtful in his approach when it comes to working with the past and how he explores our relationship with nature. Birna is no different, he explains. “For me, the heart of our music has always been about nature and our relation to it, and the way we work with the past has to resonate today. All of these old stories and parts of the older bear lore and traditions felt very distant and they didn’t really speak to me today,” he continues. “Of course, our relationship to the most predators are very problematic, it’s always been challenging, and there are some parts of our history and tradition, in terms of our relation with these animals, such as the bear, is pretty horrendous, really. So for me, it was more important to stay in the here and now and think why it is the bears are so culturally significant wherever there are bears.”

This then sparks the discussion about our place in nature and how Birna takes the human element out of the equation so we can begin to understand our place in nature “The right thing to do was to remove the human aspect out of the equation and not have us as the centre of it all the time. I think that’s also necessary in helping us understand our place in nature, which is ultimately what this album is about, understanding our place, because it’s about the cycles in nature through the eyes of the bear, and about these pulses and rhythms that we are a part of but we have removed ourselves from.”

When discussing these rhythms of nature, one of the stand out sounds that have been captured on Birna is the singing ice on the 15-minute meditative track Dvaledraumar (“Dormant Dreams”). Brought about by a collaboration with Swedish artist, musician and filmmaker Jonna Jinton, who had worked with and recorded the singing ice of Lake Stjörson in Northern Sweden, this is a sound that Selvik has been chasing for over two decades, he explains. “When I started 25 years ago and I was planning the songs for the first three albums, one of the things I have been chasing is the sound of singing ice, because I had heard about it in a documentary when I was a teenager, so I just knew I wanted that sound when I was working with ice. I never got it. With Jonna, we started collaborating a little bit through the record label I’m part owner of, By Norse Music. With this collaboration this is the song I had in mind, with the ice serenading the bear to sleep. I’m really thankful, it was a stroke of luck really.”

Alongside the use of field recordings, Selvik is very in tune with the rhythms and metres of Skaldic poetry and the poets themselves. “They are more than storytellers and more in that tradition. They were the also the truth-sayers, the keepers of tradition, the genealogists who knew the family lines. The news forecasters of their time and powerful political tools. Even though they were carriers of history, they were also very present in their time,” he continues. “It is a craft I have the utmost respect for and one I’m very much inspired by I don’t write necessarily full poems in in specific poetic meters but I take bits of specific meters and try to follow them.”

WARDRUNA also have the ability to transcend cultures, so when the band were on tour in New Zealand early this year, they collaborated with the TURONGO COLLECTIVE, Selvik states what the experience was like. “It was beautiful and there’s a lot of kinship as well, in terms of thoughts and ideas that go so, so far back in time. On a personal level, it meant a lot to me because 25 years ago, almost to the day, I visited New Zealand and travelled New Zealand, and not the touristy way, but I was allowed and able to get very close to the Maori culture back then and experience their ceremonies and parts of their relationship to nature and it and it changed me forever and gave me, I realised what I was missing,” he continues. “It was very special to me to go back there and with our songs, and to feel this close bond culturally with TURONGO COLLECTIVE.”

Birna ultimately asks us to remember where we are in nature, as Selvik states, “there is a lot of things to learn from the bear, things that a lot of like modern science is actually backing up as well in terms of our health, that we should eat locally and seasonally and we should also pay attention to and live accordingly to the cycles we’re part of. We should pay attention to the circadian rhythms of nature and be mindful of what kind of light we surround ourselves with, all of those things in this weird, unnatural world we’ve built around us. I hope the music can function as sort of a bridge to connect to these things, because a lot of us live lives where nature is something very non-present and at the same time something so profoundly needed in us.”

For the remainder of the year WARDRUNA will be continuing their world tour to promote Birna with a run of dates in the UK, Europe – including a special night at the Pompeii Amphitheatre – and North America.

Birna is out now via By Norse. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS118 here: