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Sinikka Langeland

Sinikka Langeland is a folksinger, kantele player and composer who lives in Finnskogen, Norway. Due to her remarkable vocal and concert-kantele technique, she has been described as sounding like a whole orchestra all by herself. She is now recording her own compositions with the legendary record company ECM.

She was born in Kirkenær in southeastern Norway in 1961, and studied piano, guitar and contemporary folksong. In 1981 she discovered the instrument kantele, which would become her primary musical interest along with singing. In the 1980s she also devoted time to theatre work and to studies at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, in search of additional approaches to developing her creativity. This led her back to music and studies in musicology at the University of Oslo, where she earned a degree in 1992. She then became absorbed in a massive research project to search through archives for old songs and music from Finnskogen. Cooperation with other folksingers, musicians and producers was a very productive part of this work, and among these the most important was Ove Berg, sound engineer and producer for the record company Nordic Sound. Ove Berg’s superb recordings in Grue Church of Sinikka singing mediaeval ballads, “Strengen var af røde guld” and “Lille Rosa”, released by Grappa Musikkforlag, were both nominated for a Spellemannspris (Norwegian Grammy award).

Sinikka’s songs often focus on the relationship between people and nature. With her first solo CD in 1994, “Langt innpå skoga”, she began a ten-year collaboration with Helge Westbye of the Grappa Musikkforlag label. She followed this with “Har du lyttet til elvene om natta” in 1996, featuring newly-written music to poems by lumberjack Hans Børli. In 1996 she received two awards: Finnskogprisen and Vardenprisen.

Between tours, Sinikka returns to her beloved Finnskogen. Finnskogen was populated by the Forest Finns in the 17th century, a group that today has been given the status of a national minority in Norway. The source of Sinikka’s Finnish roots is her mother, who immigrated to Norway from Karelia. Finnskogen is rich in myths, beautiful nature and wildlife, and this, combined with the presence of a group of people working actively to promote art and culture, contributed to her decision to settle in Svullrya in 1992. The Finnish language is no longer alive in the area, but the old rune songs preserve the dialect and marvelous poetry that is rooted in an ancient shamanistic forest culture. Her determination to bring the rune songs back to life resulted in the book “Karhun Emuu” and the CDs “Tirun lirun” and “Runoja”. Tore Hansen’s paintings and illustrations for her books and CDs represent a powerful contribution from one of Norway’s most highly-regarded artists, who also lives in Finnskogen. Sinikka was awarded the Edvard Prize for “Runoja” and the Norwegian-Finnish Cultural Prize in 2003 together with Ove Berg.

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7
Album Review

Sinikka Langeland: Wind And Sun

Read "Wind And Sun" reviewed by Scott Gudell


Pause. Trust your inner self to guide you. Prepare to avoid the constant bombardment of a multitude of society's mind and body piercing assults. If you're not sure where to start, Sinikka Langeland is willing to help guide you. A master of the kantele (a Nordic instrument with similarities to plucked string instruments such as a zither or dulcimer,) Langeland has released a dozen albums since the mid-1990s with Wind and Sun being the 2023 addition to her canon.

18
Album Review

Sinikka Langeland: The Magical Forest

Read "The Magical Forest" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Norwegian singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland leads her Norwegian-Finnish-Swedish Starflowers quintet through a series of songs built upon myths and legends from Finnskogen, the forested area in eastern Norway bordering Sweden where Langeland has been based since 1992. The name means “forest of the Finns," reflecting the history of Finnish migration to the place during the 17th century. The quintet is augmented by the singers of the Trio Mediaeval, giving the folkloric element in Langeland's fusion of traditional and ...

11
Album Review

Sinikka Langeland: The Magical Forest

Read "The Magical Forest" reviewed by John Kelman


Some pairings seem, in retrospect, to be made in heaven; so inevitable that it's only when they actually take place that it becomes clear how predestined they were all along. Sinikka Langeland--a forward-thinking traditional singer and kantele (Finnish zither/dulcimer variant) champion garnering significant attention in her home country of Norway over the past two decades--has, since coming to ECM with 2007's Starflowers, achieved even broader recognition for her somehow other-worldly, effortlessly beautiful music that is at once antiquated and timeless. ...

Album Review

Sinikka Langeland: The Half-Finished Heaven

Read "The Half-Finished Heaven" reviewed by Vic Albani


Esistono, lo sanno bene gli elfi piuttosto che gli umani, paradisi finiti a metà. Uno di questi lo racconta -grazie anche alle liriche di Tomas Tranströmer -nella sua quarta esperienza nei solchi di ECM la norvegese {Sinikka Langeland, regina del delicatissimo kantele, un'interessante variante del nordico dulcimer in stile cetra/arpa. L'altro è quello ormai certificato e creato dal signor Manfred Eicher che, più o meno dal centro dell'Europa, pontifica ormai da decenni una sorta di paradiso sonoro che, almeno nella ...

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Extended Analysis

The half-finished heaven

Read "The half-finished heaven" reviewed by John Kelman


She may have debuted on ECM (and, consequently, far beyond the borders of her native Norway) with 2007's Starflowers, but Sinikka Langeland has, in fact, been around for more than two decades, with her first album, Langt Innpå Skoga, released on Norway's Grappa label in 1994. Composer, singer and master of the kantele—an antiquated Scandinavian dulcimer/zither variant that Langeland has turned into a living, breathing instrument—it was on Starflowers and her 2011 ECM follow-up with the same ensemble, The Land ...

189
Album Review

Sinikka Langeland: The Land That Is Not

Read "The Land That Is Not" reviewed by John Kelman


Four years after her relentlessly beautiful ECM debut, Sinikka Langeland returns with the equally breathtaking The Land That Is Not. Following Starflowers (2007), the Norwegian singer/kantele player took a detour with Maria's Song (ECM, 2009), an intimate recording of folk songs and compositions by J.S. Bach that expanded upon territory visited on Påsketona (Nordic Sound, 2004). Few projects emerge entirely from a vacuum, and if Langeland's empathic Scandinavian quintet appeared to coalesce out of the ether for Starflower, the truth ...

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Album Review

Sinikka Langeland: Starflowers

Read "Starflowers" reviewed by Martin Gladu


In Horizons Touched: The Music Of ECM (Granta, 2007), guitarist Steve Tibbetts writes about folk artists: “Sometimes they start a musical movement that perpetuates or re-forms, sometimes they birth a musical dead end. Without much extrapolation, the first part of Tibbett's affirmation applies equally to producer Manfred Eicher, acclaimed for his talent at creating unique genre-crossing collaborations, as it does to vocalist/kantele player Sinikka Langeland. Starflowers, Langeland's first effort for ECM, is a project based on Norwegian Hans Borli's poetry ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Wind And Sun

ECM Records
2023

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The Magical Forest

ECM Records
2016

buy

Starflowers

ECM Records
2007

buy

When The Heart Is The Moon

From: Wind And Sun
By Sinikka Langeland

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