♪♪ ♪♪ [ Speaking native language ] [ Singing in Bavarian ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] [ Singing vocables ] [ Winbeck ] [ Singing ] [ Playing ] [ Winbeck ] [ Band playing ] ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Inaudible ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ This is my Hardanger fiddle.

It was built in 1904 by a fiddle maker from Valdres called Kristian Rudy.

I have my violin here, so you can see that here, on the the bridge, it's flatter on the Hardanger fiddle -- I don't know if you can see, but you usually play on several strings at a time on this instrument.

And also underneath you have some resonator strings.

So those strings underneath are resonating with the plate strings.

It reacts when the same note is played, then it's reacting, and then it's -- yeah, making this kind of sustained sound.

[ Winbeck ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ We are Morgonrode, which means, uh, like the red sky in the morning.

Me and Helga and Rasmus, who is not here today, but he's in the band, we went to school together, and then we brought in Fredrik and Andreas.

We are jazz musicians.

We use traditional music and we compose new music and use improvisation.

Did you play traditional folk music too, before that band?

I'm not raised in this tradition, traditional music in the way that maybe Selma and Helga is.

I think it's pretty easy to come and meet you and, uh, and give my own take on something that is very traditional.

And I think it's a great thing to use as a starting point to make something new.

That makes Norwegian folk music quite alive today, because it's it's on the scene, there are concerts, there are a lot of different bands and groups who who play and -- and evolve the music and keeping it up to date, or keeping it alive.

A lot of the traditional material that we use is also is -- it's there for a reason other than just -- of course, for entertainment, but also for, used to dance to, or to like "Kitte Kitte," is used for -- is a traditional look.

It's about goats.

Yeah.

You call the goats back in from the fields.

That separates it a bit, or give it another value than other genres, maybe, that you have this very strong function in daily life.

Kitte kitte, kitte kitte.

[ Winbeck ] [ Singing in Norwegian language ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Thank you so much.

Perfect.

Thank you!

♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Laughing ] Yeah!

Bravo.

Bravo!

[ Applause ] [ Winbeck ] Man: In Norway, we have preserved a lot of the music.

The radio has -- has this big archive of old music from many, many years, and a lot of the folk music in Norway is, you know, very rich, both melodic and, you know, with ornaments and interesting.

Both Hans Fredrik and we -- we still when we were young, there were even more old people who really knew.

So, for instance, me, I was going all around in this area in Osterdalen, northern, and collecting -- collecting vocal tradition.

So then I went bicycling and with this recorder up and met these old women who were calling, you know, out on the -- to get their cows back to their...

So they used their voice, a very special and individual strong tradition.

I think it's fun to have a personal touch to the music.

And because tradition is nothing that is so -- is the tradition.

It has to move on and be inspired by something.

So, uh -- so we have always been doing that.

First we do and all in this group, and everybody here is also into other types of music.

It's very good.

Good.

I got interested in jazz and improvised music.

Most of my my work is now... yeah, in improvised or experimental music.

And now I've been really interested in the Norwegian traditional music again.

I don't feel connected really to any kind of tradition.

I like writing music also, you know, but working with free musicians.

[ Thunder rumbling, music playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, how did it start for you, this musical journey?

At that time, we met and started working with traditional music and doing more modern, or our own ways of doing it.

It was very seldom -- not so many people did that; last part of the '70s and the beginning of '80s.

The tradition was, it felt like they had to protect it.

So they thought what we were doing, it was not real tradition or it was -- it could be dangerous for the tradition.

At that time, when we were young, it was like walls between the different music, not only between the folk music scene and the rest of the popular music, but even between the classical milieu, you know, the classical musicians, to the jazz musicians -- they were all separated.

We played for people who were not into folk music in a way.

But during all these years now, it has opened really much up.

And I think that the -- also the traditional tradition is stronger than ever because a lot of young people is interested in that.

But a lot of others are just using this music to express the tradition, to express themselves and going into other genres, or improvising and so on.

♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ I never knew until I went to Oslo to study music that there has existed a harp tradition in Norway.

It is about like eight, nine harps preserved in museums -- local harps.

Then I met this guy, Sverre Jensen, in Oslo, who builds old instruments, medieval instruments, and he has built this.

This is a copy of one of these harps.

So is -- this is the first harp made in modern times, in a way.

And I was just -- I just fell in love with this sound.

It's like a kind of mysterious, lyrical sound.

The last information about playing harp was here in my region, so I was inspired by that.

But no one can tell anything about how they tuned it, how they played it, what repertoire.

I think that's quite interesting too, that I can make my own tradition.

It has been my companion.

I have taken it all over Europe and the world, actually.

♪♪ [ Winbeck ] I picked them up from the freezer where they have been for, uh... well, over a year.

If you don't do anything about them, they will dry out in just -- in one day, in fact.

In the old days, people used to have them in water and they would last, like, a couple of weeks if they were lucky, or they made new ones all the time during that period when the juice is in the trees and you can, you know, loosen the bark from the tree.

Maybe you want to try one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If I may.

What -- what do I do?

Well, uh, you put your mouth over this hole here, and then you maybe should press this.

[ Plays tone ] Oh, right.

Yeah.

[ Playing notes ] Yeah.

So, you know, you have one scale.

It's the nature tone scale, as we call it.

You have one scale on the closed flute and one on the open flute.

And then you combine that, the different tones, you know.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] Welcome to my castle!

[ Laughs ] It's church time.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Vocalizing, singing in Norwegian ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ [ Man singing ] ♪♪ The lyrics in the first song is homage to my past six years like a radio cipher freestyle written verse.

But all the references and metaphors are important persons from the Norwegian folk music scene that I either enjoy the music from or that I heard tales about, or that I developed a fascination for because of what they did.

I stumbled onto folk music when I was up at Moldejazz performing where I improvised some lyrics and a girl started to [Norwegian], which is the word for Norwegian folk singing.

And she started to [Norwegian] a song about the same thing that I was rapping about.

I didn't know of any other genre in Norway where they improvised lyrics, and she told me that it was a tradition for it 100 years ago -- hundreds of years ago.

And that made me curious.

Winbeck: And have you cracked the code of folk music?

Of course not.

It's -- it takes so much time.

It's... just the rhythms are so different from what I was brought up with.

For me, it helped when I stopped thinking about rhythm and started following [Norwegian] from the fiddler where the -- I started watching the bow instead of listening to the feet because then I could follow where -- when he went up and down, when I was improvising.

♪♪ ♪♪ So, this little metal frame with a spring attached to it.

That's a Norwegian style munneharpe, mouth harp.

And they... Blacksmiths make this by hand.

You just apply it to your teeth.

And... of course, it's a very famous instrument.

You have it all across the entire globe.

But in Setesdal, which is in the south of Norway, they have this living tradition that goes back hundreds of years.

The technique is a muscle down in your throat called the epiglottis, I believe, and you have to open and close it.

Maybe you saw some willow flute playing when you visited Hulbaekmo and that gang.

It's the same principle.

You only have to use a muscle down in your throat to get every other tone up and down the scale, just as on a willow flute.

[ Playing mouth harp ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Song ends ] [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Piano music ends, horn playing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Vocalizing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The yoik is very central to Sami music.

What or who is the yoik?

The yoik is the traditional way of expressing music -- if -- you can call it music, but it's much more than music.

It's a way of telling stories.

It's a way of describing different things.

And it could be anything.

It can be a mountain, a tree, a person.

Any object can be described by using your voice in a certain way.

It has a lot of functions.

And of course, it was also a part of the old, old Sami religion, used to -- before the Christian tradition came.

Actually, it's regarded as the oldest living musical tradition in Europe today.

What happens is that we use the so-called yoik muscles that is in here.

And and when you engage the yoik muscles, you sort of raise the back of your palate and -- ♪ Oh-oh ♪ And then you change -- [High to low] ♪ Oh, ha ♪ And there's this contrast between two different sounds and the break between two vocal techniques.

[ Vocalizing ] And then also use -- [ Vocalizes ] your whole body to -- [ Vocalizing ] And then you can also use sounds.

So if you yoik an animal -- [ Throatier vocalization ] And you have a nice car.

[ Imitating motor revving ] [ Vocalizing ] I also use it as a tool for composing music because I also work as a composer and I can get ideas from what I look at.

So if I look at this instrument Hildegunn has here, that's a good -- [ Vocalizing ] That's a musical ideal that I can develop and maybe do something else with.

Inspired by the yoik.

♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ There's a lot of horn players in Norway playing traditional Norwegian music, but from the beginning it was more like... perhaps very useful to chase away dangerous animals or to give a message.

This area we are right now, when it's far away from cities and, you know, you can give a message to someone living on the other side of the the fjord.

Or if you're up in the mountains, you can hear the sound from very far, far away.

I guess from the beginning there were no holes.

And, uh... Yeah, you could just blow, like, natural tones.

And then... [ Plays ] And with the holes you can get more -- more notes.

[ Playing tune ] I became very interested in Sami music and of course very inspired.

And now we work together.

And how through the -- is... working with the small lines and how you might end it and use the -- [ Vocalizing ] So I can put this also into my music and my improvisation and try to fit in.

I enjoy that very much.

And I think there's a similarity because you're talking about composing with the instrument has a lot of limitation -- it's only notes.

And that's the same I was talking about with the yoik.

It's a short, limited -- "limited" -- form that you could actually get inspired by because you don't have all things, all notes available.

You have, just, compose something out of it.

And very often that creates a good ideas.

[ Vocalizing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Song fades, indistinct conversation ] [ Winbeck ] [ Playing, vocalizing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ There is no dream of another day ♪ Good to meet you.

They claim that they were selling less beer.

Woman: Hi!

Hi, guys.

This is an important part of living Bergen culture.

Jannicke, she's a central graphic artist in the whole metal scene; she made logos for all our bands back in the days, early '90s.

This is your band logo?

Yeah.

You got an "E" on the door.

You see the runes, which we used in Old Norse times for the Vikings as letters.

That's their alphabet, but they also had magical use.

It's the Othala, which is representative of the things that are close to you -- family, home, your little tribe, whatever.

And in a more metaphorical sense, yeah, your values.

The other one here is shaped like an F, which is the rune, "A" rune, which is both the rune for remembrance forefathers, so on, but also the artistic rune.

So, those two are central in Enslaved's graphical universe.

[ Singing in Norwegian ] This is Jannicke's... [ Winbeck ] "The black metal folk's churches are being guarded against Satanists" -- people really believe this stuff in Bergen, it was real, he did set fire to a bunch of stuff and even committed murder.

But it got -- they're not entirely sure if everything would have gone as bad if the media had done what they should have done.

Jannicke: Fueled the fire.

At some point Bergens Tidende the biggest regional newspaper, claimed on the front page that there was a satanic army who had, from second world war, there was... bunkers?

[ Conversing in Norwegian ] ...outside of Bergen, and now Satanists had filled them with guns and they were ready to do Satanic Revolution.

So, all these old people around Bergen, like, "Ergh!"

-- coughed up their coffee and they were, like, scared s * *tless because they were imagining, like, people like me and all this, coming with automatic weapons and turning Norway into a satanic slave state.

Most of us distanced ourselves when we started to see that stuff was getting out of hand.

Jannicke: Yeah.

Yeah.

Scary.

[ Norwegian ] Thank you very much.

Yeah.

Have a good day.

♪ ...the other side ♪ ♪ Should have roamed another space ♪ ♪ Should have been another place ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Winbeck ] Ivar: A lot of metal people pass by here and have a look.

Most of the time they're not exactly sure what they're supposed to look for.

In all these early Norwegian black metal albums, Enslaved, Mayhem.

Immortal, Emperor, Gorgoroth -- like, all of them, basically, did their first one or two albums in Grieg Hall.

It's part of the whole black metal history, too, because Pytten, the guy who produced all those albums, he used to sit in one of those rooms and record the symphonic orchestras for the radio, national radio.

And then he used the studio after hours to record bands, which he was growing more and more tired of -- Norwegian pop rock in the early '90s.

And then some friends of him called him up and said, "I have some kids here, and they're saying they're playing something called death metal or black metal," and Pytten were like, "That sounds insane.

I want to do it.

Send them down here."

And he loved it because it was just something really -- something different.

And that's how all these legendary albums came about.

Every night after hours, they took the drums, waited till all the orchestral guys went home.

They put up the drums in here, and then they put microphones all over the hall.

So it's all natural reverb from this room.

And then when they're finished at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, they put everything back in the studio.

Like -- [ Whistles nonchalantly ] "We've been here all night recording in the studio."

That went on for weeks.

And that gives it that album a very special, special sound.

I think there also might have been -- shh!

Theoretically a chance that we borrowed some of the timpani.

Listen to our first album.

There's a lot of cheesy keyboard sounds, but the timpani sounds really good and really authentic.

That might be theoretically because we borrowed some timpani from the people here.

So also, a direct influence of Edvard Grieg to your music, you would say?

With Grieg especially, I think it was the folk elements.

The black metal bands were inspired by the folk folkish vibe that was also conducted by Grieg through his music, because he was very influenced by it.

So, was it always like kind of a dream to play a concert here one day when you started this?

It was not not even within the realm of possibilities at all, but we were definitely thinking, Oh, it would be very cool to play here sometime.

And with Enslaved next year, yeah, as we're playing here and that's the first time that I'm doing, like... the thing that started everything in the basement, and now we're playing upstairs.

Yeah, it took 30 years, but.

Yeah, there's bigger venues in the world, and I'm sure there's more famous ones.

But for us, this is probably the most special one.

[ Indistinct conversation ] [ Winbeck ] ...spirit of exploration of, you know, Viking is a verb -- is to go viking.

[ Winbeck ] ...go sort of exploring, then you go Viking, you know?

[ String instruments, singing ] Yeah, we can just record a few more takes.

Very well done.

Then you can move up to that.

Yeah?

Anything.

♪♪ Great.

Yeah!

Very awesome.

Thank you.

I got goosebumps.

Really?

Yes, that's true.

Perfect.

[ Singing in Norwegian ]