KRAUKA

They played their first concert in so unlikely a place as Lejre Research Center, and have received recognition from all over Europe for their competent research into the Nordic music traditions of the Viking period. Krauka (Guðjón Rúdolf Guðmundsson , Aksel Striim and Jens Villy Pedersen) have recorded yet another collection of new and old songs under the title Bylur, which in Icelandic bears the double meaning of snowstorm and noise. And parts of the album were actually recorded under winter conditions in Denmark and Icelandsuch as during a snowstorm in the western fiords. But in their own way, Krauka do actually make an awful noise compared to earlier albums, since this album has been a personal challenge and an exploration of their own musical limitations.



Bylur, as its lauded predecessor Stiklur from 2003, has been created in close collaboration with producers Thorkell Atlason and Henrik Corfitsen, whose electronic contributions combines naturally with the groups own sound universe the tracks still resound with strong, poetic male voices, rebec, hand drums, jewish harps, lyres and flutes, and they still draw on Icelandic text sources and medieval song tradition. The Vikings have been transported into a present which offers impulses they hardly could have imagined in their own time. On Bylur, the Icelandic song tradition meets with samples and electronic sound collages, hand-played hide-drums combine with hip hop and time honored musicianship executed with modern musical curiosity. But above all, sun, snow and ocean - the Nordic nature - are the natural inhabitants of these tracks, which seem to flourish best outdoors, where the campfire burns, the dance is on, followed by a Viking dip in the ocean. Bylur is imbued with an infectious feel for everything that makes life worth living, for better and for worse - from the pricking of food on your tongue to the stormy soul of battle.



Bylur is the past at its most radical - and the present where it delves deepest into the soil. It is an experiment without many parallels in modern music, played by three actually quite old-fashioned musicians with the joy of their work tattooed on their souls - and with a captivating, folk sound, which at the end of the day is hardly foreign to even the most hardcore avant-garde fan . It is a door, which allows us to recognize both what we were and what we are becoming in our times, when the world has come knocking with new sounds and impulses. But above all, it is the sound of Krauka at their most sweepingly impressive and at their most fearless.



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