Hedningarna

The band that most radically changed the sound of contemporary Swedish folk music started as three university students with a common interest in ancient instruments getting together to play. The story goes that as they started to play together and experiment with the sound, a fellow student ducked in, listened for a bit and said they sound like "hedningarna" or "heathens," and the name stuck. Totte Mattsson recalled that the old instruments—lute, bagpipe and tambourine—"loved playing with each other," so the university students jumped in without thinking about how they were supposed to play traditional music. Their songs were based on old tunes that resurrected a roughhewn, wilder past in stark contrast to the sleek, ultramodern Sweden of the day.

The three musicians, Mattsson, Bjorn Tallin and Anders Norudde, created a revolution in traditional music, combining electronic sounds and with mostly forgotten instruments such as the Swedish hurdy-gurdy. To their own surprise, the members of Hedningarna found that their first album, in 1987, was a relative hit, creating a cult following that appealed to the newly emergent folk movement as well as fans of electronic and drone music. The group then pulled another surprise out of its bag of tricks, teaming up with two Finnish female singers, Sanna Kurki-Suonio and Tellu Paulasto for the Kaksi! CD. This new cross-border hybrid gave the group a whole new dimension, adding gothic lyrics to the dark and stormy music. In 1996, the Finnish women left the group to raise families and the men released Hippjokk.

Hedningarna always took time between albums as its members also made solo recordings. In 1999, the group released Karelia Visa, an exploration of music from the Karelia area of Finland that was dominated by the Soviet Union for many years. The album was more somber than their earlier music, reflecting the desolate frozen landscape of Karelia. Soon after, the group added Magnus Stinnerbom on violin. The young player, part of the group Harv, first became interested in Swedish folk music as a teenager listening to Kaksi!. With a slightly revamped line-up, Hedningarna released a few new tracks for a retrospective CD. —Marty Lipp