STARTHIEF

Digital platforms mix “digital water” and “sewage” in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy, and our democracy.

from “Stop Drinking From The Toilet“

I wrote rants against “bad information” and calls for media literacy on my blog before Facebook even existed. People making shit up so they could sound like experts, or to support a pet theory or mindset. Mistakes and guesswork with the disclaimers filed off, presented as fact. Old science, poorly done science, or outright fraud, since disproven but echoing on regardless and finding new ears. Conspiracy theories, whether benign or bigoted. And intentional disinformation.

The situation absolutely got far worse when companies began to profit off of “engagement.”

And I feel like it s gotten a notch worse in the AI era. There are far too many people who are all too trusting of AI — they are language models, not truth models. It’s another disinformation tool that is absolutely exploited and multiplied by bad actors. People want to believe the politicians they support, who they are maybe only supporting because of the lies in the first place.

Be careful out there.

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Album #41 (that’s the only name it has so far) has been hopping along. There’s 33 minutes of material, and I have a plan for the next bit. It definitely has a flavor, with a lot of noisy/glassy digital oscillators and some resonant filters introducing spectral movement, though those words of course don’t adequately describe the sound.

One of the spices in that flavor is the Decadebridge Sn (Tin), a pocket-sized 3-op lo-fi FM drone synth with simplified controls. It has CV control, but a good bit of latency on its pitch and FM inputs but none on its VCA, so if you plan to sequence it, it might call for a gate delay to keep pitches and envelopes aligned. It makes some lovely growls — not really something I couldn’t do with Algo or Spectraphon or a bit of fumbling in software — but it puts inspiration on tap at an almost toylike price.

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The past couple of weekends, I’ve gone for walks around Mallard Lake. It’s 2.6 miles, so it’s decent exercise that I can recover from fairly swiftly instead of feeling wiped out for days. It has a paved section (with many bicyclists, joggers, dog walkers and families with strollers) more exposed to the sun until it runs in the shadow of a tall highway bridge across the river valley, and a dirt/gravel section (pedestrians only and much less traveled) that runs alongside a cliff with little trickling waterfalls, and a moderately heavily wooded, swampy area before emerging into a small tallgrass prairie. It’s a lovely place to walk.

I’ve walked it occasionally before — usually only a few times per year while the weather is cooler, usually in the Halloween to Christmas range. Until this year I haven’t seen wildlife other than birds (lots of birds!) and bugs, but these last two times there have been deer.

Back in those journaling days, I went through lots of notebooks with nice paper that could stand up to a fountain pen, etc. I wasn’t really a stationery geek, though I did love pens.

But for taking notes on the go, I had a Mead Five Star Fat Lil’ Planner. I replaced the silly planner stuff with a plain Fat Lil’ Notebook — spiral-bound and fairly thick, with perforated 3.5″ x 5.5″ sheets that could be torn off if you wanted to. A Cordura-or-something-like-it case that zipped closed securely, the spiral made a good place to tuck a pen or two, and there were a couple extra pockets and enough space to temporarily stash small items inside. Perfect for my needs. And they stopped making them almost 30 years ago, but you can still find a few on eBay.

I almost just bought one to recreate what I had then. But since pocket journals have become much more of a thing since then, what with Moleskine and Field Notes and so on, so I poked around a bit first. Field Notes happens to be 3.5 x 5.5, and there are several other brands in the same format with different types of paper, covers, and price ranges. A6 seems like a nicer size to me and there are several Japanese journal brands that use it, but after reviews and price comparisons, I went for the FN format with a relatively cheap, waxed canvas zippered cover and small Lochby notebooks which use Tomoe River paper that’s supposed to work well with fountain pens. Though I’m not sure yet whether I’ll want to use a favorite rollerball (Lamy Al-Star or Rotring Core) or a (probably Pilot or Lamy) fountain pen.

I want to start journaling again, and I don’t mean blogging. Literally writing with ink on paper. I once did a lot of this as a devotional practice while I was Kemetic Orthodox. I often used a dip pen, or sometimes a fountain pen, and though it wasn’t calligraphy, the pace of writing was more deliberate and meditative. What I wrote was between me and God(s), and I destroyed all of those writings when I left the temple because there were some oathbound secrets, as well as some personal history that didn’t need to be preserved anymore. And this is fine, I have no regrets about doing that.

To keep this short and general and not too personal, I owe a lot to my first several years in the temple. It dragged my self-esteem out of a pit, got me taking care of myself at least somewhat, spurred me to be more serious about music, conspired to get me together with my spouse, and taught me a lot of things. But eventually, I both burned out with the work of being a reverend (while also being a socially anxious introvert) and came to the conclusion that I needed something else for my mental health and personal growth, even if I didn’t know what that was yet. I wasn’t looking for different gods (still loving the same ones), or a different organization (but very likely no organization).

I’ve certainly gone through some phases in the intervening years where I wasn’t sure what I believed or perhaps how I believed, but always disqualified from atheism by my experiences. (I feel like if I have to doubt certain things then I immediately have to doubt everything and that’s just impractical.) I’ve always believed that religion is an art, rather than a poor substitute for science, and now I feel the push to make that kind of art again.

As I’ve said, I was looking forward to yesterday’s Bandcamp Friday for quite a while. I had a big haul of 9 new (to me) albums and one old.

And since I had also picked up one Heilung album a few weeks ago without waiting and have been obsessing over them a bit, I will bring it up here too.

But first I’ll mention Nine Treasures. This was an album I listened to many times when I was a Google Play Music subscriber, and it’s on Bandcamp as a free/pay-what-you-want option so I wanted to grab it (and throw a few bucks at them for giving me something I’ve already enjoyed so much). Mongolian metal with violin solos, and it’s just fun.

Also on the fun side: music for synthesizers and orchestra, inspired by Archimedes. It was written during the pandemic but a lot of it is very 60s-70s in composition style and in the timbres used, and there’s a charming lightness about the whole thing.

For a much more creepy and somber mood (but you know I love this sort of thing), we have Stuart Liebig’s dark ambient music with synths and percussion samples. I think it speaks well of him that the drums, rattles etc. don’t feel like samples but like it was all performed specifically for this music, it just fits so well. On my first listen, my wife was also listening to a podcast about creepy mysterious encounters with aliens, ghosts etc. and there was a whole mood there.

Also dark and “ambient” but abstract, tense and inscrutable, I found that little mermaid is a bit too intrusive at times for trying to get to sleep — the opposite of Eno’s description of ambient music. But I’m very much enjoying a proper listen this morning — good stuff.

While we’re in the shadow lands, how about some doomgaze? If that’s really the right term; this is really neither as doomy or as shoegazey as many other things. Regardless: good band, music that works for relaxing or in the car or working, I don’t have a deep analysis here.

Speaking of good bands, this Vollte album. Post-rock, a bit prog. Enjoyable. I totally imagined a scene from a heist movie that turned into a chase during “Lightning strikes us.”

Garmarna is a group I’ve enjoyed for quite some time, but I didn’t keep up with them. Swedish folk rock with electronics, it all just fits together so well. think after listening to this one, Vittrad (my first exposure to them and a tie for my favorite hurdy gurdy-focused album) is still my favorite, but this is still extremely good. Produced by Chris from Heilung (you can hear it especially in the ambience of “Två Systrar”) and an understated guest vocal from Maria, which is how I happened to stumble into this.

I almost dismissed this group as copycats of Heilung, and they don’t have the same intense impact. But they are very good in their own right and I will be listening to this album a lot more in the near future. I’ll probably end up getting their others as well.

For my understanding of Heilung songs I can thank lyrics-translate.com and a few interviews and commentaries that I’ve read online. It’s not a necessary step to enjoy the music but for me it deepens the experience.

The overall theme of Heilung’s first studio album, Ofnir, is the story of a peaceful village forced into war, made into bloodthirsty killers seeking vengeance. Then about halfway through, it shifts to mysticism with a poem about a forest and a 30-minute long triptych based on the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem. So we have a kind of conversion of the bad into the good, which seems to very much be a theme for Heilung overall.

The band says that while “Ofnir” is a very masculine album, “Futha” is feminine. To me, it’s very much about overcoming dangers and fears, and healing. It starts with the end — Ragnarok — and turns it aside with chanted incantations against every kind of evil spirit. There are songs about protection (including my favorite, “Othan”, executed so well that you can hear the love in it) and healing, but also a poem and chant about ice that leads to a rousing chant about life-sustaining fire. Overall, the theme makes this my favorite album. It’s close though…

Drif is a little more difficult to sum up, with a bit of less easily translated material to start, and ranges from the most ancient song lyrics in the world in an Ugarit dialect to the puzzling two-dimensional palindromic Sator Square, to an actual Roman marching song that’s a scathing satire of Caesar. But it opens with a song of love and well-wishing, and there’s a healing song and a song where a curse is transformed into a blessing. Overall I would say this is the most beautiful of their albums to listen to. (Though the spoken-word piece about a Gaulish tribe defeated by Romans includes the Wilhelm scream, and “Tenet” — which the band knew people would play backward to confirm its palindromic nature — includes some silly phrases in backwards English.)

If I remember right, it was 2010 the first time we went to “JFest”, the St. Louis Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens every Labor Day weekend. We watched St. Louis Osuwa Taiko twice that day and I lit up when they mentioned having beginners’ classes. I probably would have shied away from it but the friends we were with encouraged me to give it a try. I did it, persisted though it was physically tough and I lacked in endurance, and then qualified to join the performing group. I performed at two JFests and an early Spring event there called “Sake & Sakura”, which would be my last, as I left to concentrate on my own creative pursuits.

Anyway, right at the end of summer, the weather is often still quite hot and often humid. In one evening show as I played a shaker in the back during the finale, I could see steam rising from the sweating performers in the front line. As I recall, we spent the majority of our time that weekend when we weren’t performing, just sitting in the air-conditioned green room.

Since those days I haven’t been very physically active, and my spouse isn’t either. I also sunburn easily and my eyes are sun-sensitive, and it has been known to trigger anxiety (though I think the mere recognition that it does that, and wearing a hat and the right glasses/sunglasses, helps a ton). So a day at the festival, wandering the extensive garden grounds in hot, sunny, humid weather, with no good place to sit other than the ground for performances, is a lot for us.

We skipped it the last few year due to that hot weather. But with slightly more favorable weather this time, we went for it. It wore us out but we had a good time. Happy to say though I’m a little stiff (probably from standing in one spot for too long while watching the Eisa and taiko performances) I’m not too sunburned or too wiped out today. The gardens themselves were either nicer than ever or I appreciated them more, and I was lucky enough to snap a half-decent photo of a hummingbird visiting some nifty star-shaped flowers.

We had both been looking forward to the koi that swarm a footbridge in Seiwa-en, the Japanese garden around a lake that is one of the place’s main features. But there was an algae bloom and few fish; we speculated that on the third day of a very crowded festival they’d already eaten more than enough kibble from the vending machine and were sleeping it off.

The taiko group was fantastic, as always. I only recognize a few people from when I was part of it. They have a new (to me) member who played an actual odaiko solo piece and she absolutely was killing it. That’s a staple of more “professional” groups’ repertoire but isn’t something that we ever did while I was in the group or the few years after, and I loved to see it. (Many taiko pieces do have brief, often very structured solo sections, so most performers do get a chance to solo a little bit.)

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On a whim I went back and re-read the last few years of this blog. I don’t really have much insight, other than to laugh at the number of times I have changed my mind about things that I was sure of at the time.

Toneboosters released a new equalizer plugin (simply “Equalizer Pro”) that instantly became a new favorite. This is the first one I’ve tried where I’ve felt like dynamic EQ is worth using (instead of, say, ZPlane Peel or Bitwig Multiband Split with a dynamics plugin in its chain), and it’s also got options for bands that apply only to transients or sustained sounds (oooh) as well as bands that apply only to “ambience” (reverb) or direct sounds (aaaah). That last one can be cool as a creative effect even when the detection is wrong, and just in testing I’ve found that using it to emphasize particular ranges of reverb is pretty great. Not all reverb has good EQ controls built in, and even when it does, using this instead can kind of glue things together nicely. And for all that this plugin does, it’s cheaper than a lot of its competitors.

So, Landscape Ferrous.

The first thing is, it’s not an eBow. Those use a pickup and electromagnet to create feedback to encourage and extend vibration — like pushing a child on a swing when they reach the apex, to keep them swinging further and longer.

Ferrous doesn’t have any sensors; it’s just 6 small magnets on a rotating disk. So it’s like pushing the kid at timed intervals. If the timing matches the kid’s motion (or is 1/2 the speed, or 1/3, 1/4, etc.) it will boost it, otherwise it will dampen it.

So you can’t hold it over strings and then play a melody on the frets normally. But you can hold it over a bunch of strings, tines, etc. and tune in different resonant vibration modes, and that’s what it’s all about. You can control the speed with a dial, a button, an inconveniently placed touch sensor (in most cases it’s going to be face-down above strings… hmm) or a CV input.

So it works best when you have a lot of vibration modes available in a small space and the subjects are eager to resonate freely — e.g. lots of open strings in a small space, like on our bowed psaltery, or lots of available harmonics in multiple pitches, such as a kalimba or acoustic guitar (with its relatively longer strings). It’d probably be fantastic with an autoharp, a hammered dulcimer, or a piano.

It’s kind of boring when there’s less to work with, as on a mountain dulcimer, steel tongue drum, or bass guitar. You can get sine waves and maybe simple chords, but not a whole panoply of potential frequencies to sweep through… and they tend to be fairly quiet too.

Holding it at the right distance is a bit tricky. You want it as close as possible without colliding — but it’s got magnets that want to pull toward the metallic object(s) you’re working with, and a vibrating string/tine needs a lot more space than an inert one. You also don’t want to hold it near an electromagnetic pickup unless you just want to hear the hum.

There’s a weird thing it does with the kalimba (and a lesser extent, other instruments) where if the frequency isn’t just right, it’ll still excite the thing but bend the pitch. So the low C tine on the kalimba might be happy to play Bb or D — and if you hit C dead on, the whole thing rattles like mad. It takes some finesse!

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But what’s even better is that experimenting with this had me dusting off my old lap steel guitar. I bought a used Rogue Jersey Lightning several years ago out of curiosity, knowing that some other ambient musicians used them on occasion, but I found it was awkward to work with given my setup at the time. So it’s been sitting idle. But now, since I have things ready for a bass guitar or kalimba with minimal fuss, the lap steel is also no trouble. With reverb and other processing it is extremely suitable, so it’s going to join my stable of occasionally-used instruments.

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There’s been some buzz about the new Waldorf Microwave 1 plugin, because it’s extremely similar to the original hardware. I gave it a spin, and though I do like some of the lo-fi sounds it produces I really don’t find its UI much fun to work with. And I don’t need another software synth…

But it did get me thinking about wavetables again. I used to be really into them for a while, first with Serum (and sometimes Massive), then Disting bridging the way to SynthTech E352/E370. Shapeshifter, despite using wavetables, got me a bit away from that because I saw its tables as a secondary feature, and of course more recently I moved to RYK Algo instead.

So I fired up some older plugins. Vital is awfully good for a free synth, and its spectral morph and distortion parameters offer some cool stuff. But I reinstalled Serum and found inspiration there, despite it not being much like Microwave at all. Whatever works!

I dropped a few items off that Bandcamp wishlist, but then added more. It’s up to 19 new ones just from the last couple of weeks. Not all neofolk and related though, there’s some very electronic stuff (e.g. Grischa Lichtenberger, Oren Ambarchi, and others). It’s going to be difficult picking a subset of the 37 total albums on that list for the next Bandcamp Friday.

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I had a plan. I was going to wait for the Landscape Ferrous to arrive and see how it worked with various instruments and objects, and maybe feature it in every track on the next album. But I got too inspired, and last night I recorded a “solo” on the Elmyra 2 as well as a very nice evolving drone that’ll be the basis of another track. Nice problem to have I guess 🙂

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I never mentioned how the third pair of glasses (Zenni “square” frames with 1.61 purple eyeQLenz) turned out. The answer: mostly great. They eliminate the problems I had with the rimless ones (distracting posts in my FOV that my eyes kept trying to focus on, earpieces pinching my head, possible weirdness with the focal zones). From my eyes, the color tint is only noticeable in light reflected from behind, which is a little odd at first but not too distracting. I had no trouble adapting to them very quickly. They also do a great job cutting the sun’s glare without a darkening effect, noticeable color distortion or loss of contrast — maybe that’s the anti-IR? Anyway, in a lot of ways these may be my favorite glasses ever.

From outside, they can look a bit odd. Reddish-purple to pinkish, or blue, blue-gray or blue-green depending on relative angles of reflected/refracted light and your line of sight. I think there’s a bug in the pixel shader’s lighting algorithm 😉

The new album is now up on Bandcamp. Free or pay-what-you-want as always.

Notes are here. Enjoy!

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If I wanted to make some general statements about it… well. I just followed my ears and this is where things went. There were really only a couple of things I intentionally was trying out.

One was a technique used on both “Bloom Out” and “Rust Song”: the rapid sequencing of notes into a physical modeling synth in order to turn its relatively pluck- or mallet-like sounds into a continuous blur, a drone with texture. Somebody had asked about using Rings for drones on the ModWiggler forum and this was something I ran into and wanted to use a bit more.

The other was simply, playing the Elmyra 2. It invites — at least to me — a certain style of playing, not purely drones, and not just tuning in four notes and sitting on those. But a combination of drone and melody, taking advantage of its distorted nature and its slightly weird delay effect. Again, a cousin to how I did things on the Lyra-8, but it’s more of a refined thing. Easier to control in a sense but also sonically a little more wild.

Something else I found myself doing without realizing until I was done: I used a lot of very simple straight rhythmic pulses — driven by LFOs or a delay or a looping sound, or in one case, the beat frequency interference between oscillators — and then trailing them from one track into the next more than once. Echoes of Pulse Code I guess, or a subconscious reaction to reading Dilla Time and doing the opposite of that? 😉

Another thing that happened without planning it was making drum parts and then obliterating them. The track “Bloom Out” had this insistent “sub thump” part that overwhelmed the rest, and after some initial dynamic tweaks I found myself wondering how the piece would sound without it. It wasn’t too difficult to isolate and restrict it to a nearly subliminal background pulse that slipped right in with the complex texture of the layered Anyma V part. The other instance was the short track “Metric” which had a lopsided beat, cymbal splashes and some other material from the EP-133. I didn’t think it worked at all, and was going to reject the track entirely until I decided to let Velvet Machine blend it into a sonic smoothie. I found that, combined with the initial glitchy synth pulse, it was suddenly something pretty interesting. (This is not the first time I rescued a track by melting it down with massive reverb, but usually I use the juice as a single part or a transition rather than keeping it all. Granted it’s a very short track.)

Between that, and using Brusfri noise reduction in place of EQ to tame an overly oppressive drone in “Intro”, I’m kind of wanting to experiment more with this. A different kind of “subtractive synthesis” eh? Record a part, and then remove it from the mix after it’s already done.

…And yes, toward the end of the project I was influenced by Heilung. I’m not out to imitate anyone, I didn’t suddenly go Viking (*) or bring in lots more drumming or add some chants, but the growly and whispery vocal stylings of one Kai Uwe Faust as well as some of the quieter and subtler textures on the album Futha did put a hand on the wheel. One of many hands, and some of those others were non-musical thoughts and feelings that wormed their way into my music. It’s always like this. It’s not like I did anything new to me texture-wise. (I did actually consider grabbing a mic and recording some non-verbal vocal stuff for further processing… but again, that’s an idea I’ve had before, and may still do someday.)

(*) After finishing the album I did grab a tagelharpa sample instrument for Kontakt, but it’s a really limited instrument… I might heavily process it and use it for exactly one drone ever. Or feed it into Beads, or something where I can stomp a pedal to artificially sustain it via reverb etc. Hmm.

Overall I felt quite inspired during this time, with most of it happening in two bursts of creation. At the same time, I also feel particularly disinterested in new gear now. I know that’s a little weird to say so soon after getting the Elmyra, and a nOb Control (more about that later) and with some pre-ordered stuff (*) finally on the way, but I feel like this mood is going to stick a while. What I have now may have some redundancies, some gear that doesn’t get used very often, etc. but it all works out fine. So I’m not making any changes!

(*) I have a tracking number for the Landscape Ferrous, the rotating magnetic thingy, and I kind of suspect it’s going to be visiting the next album a lot… so, weird strings and kalimba and tongue drum incoming!

Looking at that gear usage, I gotta admit weird things with no particular explanation stand out:

• Almost no VCV Rack, but plenty of Bitwig Grid.
• More Rings than I’ve used in a while and plenty of RYK Algo, but less Spectraphon and Odessa and no Akemie’s Castle at all.
• Even more Velvet Machine than usual but almost no Raum, and generally more reverbs than delays this time when I’d been trending the other way.

It’s all good though, and this just makes me want to get Castle and Raum into the next thing.

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Re: the nOb Control. It’s kind of natural to use — point the mouse at a knob on the screen, then turn a real knob, and it “just works”… except when it doesn’t. UIs are invariably designed for mice but they all have their own quirks. The two switches on the nOb are meant to cover most cases but some UIs work better than others. Also I kept finding myself trying to mouse away while still trying to use the knob, so it takes a little practice. And I have to remember to use it in the first place and not just go with the mouse like I have for decades now. But when I let the right set of muscle memory take over, it does delivers a super smooth, tactile experience that allows nice fine control.

All that being said, its price is higher than it once was when I first heard of it, and it’s in a weird space between “luxury toy” and useful tool. So jury’s still kind of out on whether it was worthwhile.

…the time when I’ve finished recording the material for another album and am going to start in with mastering next.

This one doesn’t even have a name yet, it’s just “next up” or “TEST_notforrelease.” I do have a couple of thoughts about the name, but I’m going to sleep on it and do some pre-mastering test listens.

I’ve been particularly inspired lately, not just from the excitement of discovering new music I like a lot, but just generally feeling more driven to create. I started this one probably on July 13 or 14, recorded 5 in the week from the end of July to beginning of August, and four more in the last 4 days.

While I make music I keep forgetting that the Nob Control is even there, and mostly not using it. It has come in handy a couple of times for fine-tuning some settings, but I think I’m just so use to mousing everything (unless I have a fader or pedal assigned to it) that it doesn’t occur to me to give it a literal whirl.

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For our 20th anniversary we wanted to take a special vacation, just for us rather than making the long drive to visit our families. (With my parents in town we don’t need to go to the Atlanta area anymore, at least.) We had some general ideas for it for quite a while, started to plan out specifics, rethought some things, then when looking at specific dates adjusted the plan again. Now it’s going to be an October trip with a couple days in the Gatlinburg area, a couple in Myrtle Beach, and a day in Chattanooga plus the drive time between them… with an aquarium visit at every destination. While Appalachian tourism in autumn is definitely a thing, the beach hotel is decidedly off-season and cheap. And though it’s been a long time since I’ve gone swimming and even longer since it was in salt water on a beach, I’m looking forward to that hotel hot tub too.

I was just saying, I make the music that I want to hear. But I do like a lot of different kinds of music, and I can’t make them all. I’m not an entire taiko ensemble, I don’t have a lovely female singing voice (or much of any singing voice at all), I can’t play the hammered dulcimer, I’m not a virtuoso bassist, I’ve never been happy with the techno I’ve done (I don’t think I’m perfectionist enough for that, heh). I’m happy making one overall kind of music, thanks.

Anyway…

When I got home from work yesterday my wife was watching a live show by the band Heilung. And… oh wow.

Primitive, powerful, ritualistic, shamanic, and yet really well produced, a very full and large sound. Inspiring and stunning. (They say their music is aggressive and powerful and scary but their intention is that the audience goes away from it feeling better. — “heilung” means “healing” after all.) They are not at all shy with the reverb, a bit more subtle with electronics otherwise for the most part. Droney and percussion-punctuated, two things I really like, with throat singing (which I also like and really suits percussion) and some beautiful and/or creepy other vocals. The occasional spoken word bit, which personally isn’t my jam but it works for them. Visually they are a spectacle, one might even say iconic. Incredible costume and makeup work and props you’d expect of a tribe from… well honestly, the world, or at least the northern bits of it for the most part. Yes, their primary influences are Germanic and Scandanavian, but as they say, those people were travelers and explorers, and they are not shy of ancient influences from other continents. And — I doublechecked — they are not white supremacist shitheads, they hold anti-racist values.

Between Heilung, remembering how much I liked Nine Treasures back when I was on Google Play Music, and researching other neo-folk groups with a vaguely similar aesthetic (and vetting their politics) there are now 12 more albums 14 more albums on my Bandcamp wishlist.

Aside from the aforementioned, there’s Nytt Land, Vévaki, Paleowolf, Ochelle Soroki, Kallomäki, and Danheim. Nytt Land is honestly an imitator of Heilung (after previously being sort of “the Wardruna of Siberia”), and Vévaki is like if Heilung were extremely chill and preferred to make pretty music rather than intense ritual. Paleowolf and Danheim are more toward the ambient side, while Ochelle Soroki fuses Russian and Nordic folk (often reminding me a lot of Värttinä or Garmarna).

So that brings up groups I’ve already been into: Värttinä is a female-led Karelian (Finnish) folk supergroup with multiple releases from 1987 to 2015. I loved the wild time signatures and the sense of fun on the first couple of albums I heard of theirs. I was playing it in my cubicle at work one day when a coworker asked me… “are those singing cats?”

Garmarna is a Swedish folk-rock band that also gets into electronic beats a bit. Excellent singer and lots of hurdy-gurdy, and everything fits well together whether they’re doing kind of a menacing and brooding thing or a trip-hop beat or something more strictly folky.

Corvus Corax is another big group; they started as an attempt to recreate medieval popular/folk music (rather than ecclesiastical or court music) based on scant sources, and kind of grew from there. From the albums I’ve heard they generally tend toward Germanic, Celtic and Norse in flavor but there’s a little of everything, grouping up with a taiko ensemble, members of Blind Guardian and Faith No More, and performed an opera based on the original manuscript of Carmina Burana but not Carl Orff’s composition. They were originally supposed to perform in the first episode of the Game of Thrones TV show but it was rewritten and they were dropped. Anyway, think bombastic big drums and lots of bagpipes/horns, but also some drinking songs and such.

Eluveitie is a Swiss folk metal band, another one that has had dozens of members (including Liv Christine briefly). Gaul is their thing, and one of their albums was entirely in Gaulish aside from a spoken-word intro. I like that album quite a lot but mostly am not into their more regular metal side with Cookie Monster vocals etc., though they do have at least a few good songs.

Faun is a German pagan folk band… which covered some of those aforementioned Gaulish Eluveitie songs but in German. More purely folky but still connected to all of this.