Sjofn [ENHANCED]

Gjallarhorn

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 7, 2000)
• Original Release Date: November 7, 2000
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced
• Label: Northside Records
• ASIN: B0000516VE
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #101,238 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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  Music > Indie Music > World Music > Europe > Scandinavia

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Gjallarhorn's debut made them plenty of friends with its unusual mix of Nordic folk and didgeridoo. The three years since their last disc have given them time to develop their unique sound and return with a highly satisfying album. Singer Jenny Wilhelms has learned to use her voice to its fullest, and her fiddle playing, along with that of Christopher Ohman, provides the melodic base of the band, while the didgeridoo offers an underlying drone, a technique shared by other Nordic bands such as Garmarna. Beautifully arranged, the opener "Suvetar" makes for a seductive entry into an album that constantly amazes with its depth. Like Wimme, the Finnish-based Gjallarhorn are pushing at the bounds of Scandinavian music, even including samples of dolphin sounds on the closing "Sinivatsa." There's little doubt they've evaded the traditional sophomore jinx. --Chris Nickson

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "arise to see the seeds", January 9, 2004

By A Customer

This CD makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. "Suvetar," the album opener, is a 3000-year-old fertility goddess chant-song and gives off magick energy like sparks from a bonfire. From there the CD varies in intensity but never in quality. Jenny Wilhelm's voice is a treasure. It reminds me of Sandy Denny and Maddy Prior simultaneously, and she flies above the band with effortless grace while they pull and roil and flare beneath. The songs are about love in its many forms, and on the liner notes it is claimed that the goddess Sjofn (a love goddess from the Norse tradition) is the "guardian" of this recording.

Maybe that's why this music sounds so untamed and transcendent. It sounds truly pagan, not in a tacky "let's-pretend-like" sense (like so much deliberately "pagan" music) but in a fiery, direct way, tribal and present, vivid and hallucinatory at the same time.

In short "Sjofn" is one of the best "folk" recordings I have ever heard. You can spend a lot of time with this recording and still not discover every nuance. That is true of all the Gjallarhorn I have heard so far, but never more so than with this CD. Beautiful, primitive and fey, "Sjofn" is not to be missed.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars concurring with everyone else's praise, April 1, 2004

By	Nicole M. Masika (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just want to put in another 5 star review. I am another who can truly feel the power of the Goddess in this recording. I have also seen Gjallarhorn and they are every bit as amazing in person, so I surely don't think this CD is overproduced-ths songs sound substantially the same live. This is also a good CD for testing new stereo systems because of its dynamic range.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential, December 19, 2002

By	Hameed Chughtai (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Gjallarhorn (pronounced "Yal-lar-horn"), The band is Finnish, but hails from a Swedish-speaking area on the West Coast of Finland, a fringe geographical area where 50% of the people speak Swedish and the music remains Swedish in character. Most of their repertoire is the folk music of these Swedish-speaking Finns, from the unique minuets and ballads that have only survived in Ostrobothnia, to the oldest traditional waltzes.
The narrative of Gjallarhorn's songs spring primarily from Nordic mythology. The Gjallarhorn is the horn with which the gatekeeper god, Heimdal, sent messages from the gods of Asgård to the mortals of Midgård. The name of the horn is related to the word gjala, which means 'to shout' or 'to sing out.'
--This CD is essential in every world-music fan collection--
Five solid gold stars.