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.