Sjofn

Artist: Gjallarhorn
Label: Northside Records
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Enhanced
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 021561605220
EAN: 0021561605220
ASIN: B0000516VE

Release Date: 2000-11-07

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Tracks:

Goddess Of Spring
Tova And The King
Dejelill And Lagerman
Intro From Jeppo-Polska
Minuet From Jeppo-Polska
Come, Holy Spirit
The Water-Sprite And The Maiden
Su Ru Ruskadirej
Mountain Haunted
Oravais Minuet
Dance A Little...
Hjaoningarima
Dolphin Calling

Similar Items:

Trä
God's Musicians
Vengeance
Nordic Roots: Northside Sampler
Grimborg

Customer Reviews:

Sjofn is the best of old and new northen music.......2006-03-19

This is a wonderful compilation of Gjallarhorn's sound. From traditional Norwiegian melodies to a Moari/Norse sound. If your looking for something new with familiarity this is a good choice

The single best ethno/folk album I've yet to hear.......2005-09-15

The title sums it all up, really.

I first saw Gjallarhorn live back in 1998, and was immediately completely zonked by the sound.
Jenny's voice is amazing, the songs are hauntingly beautiful and Martin's production is razor sharp while still sounding raw.

Above all, this album has that natural barefoot "toes in the soil"-feel that almost every ethno-fusio band misses. This is just so immediate and honest... There is zero pretention but maximun magic present on this album!

The first album is also great (I hear there is a remastered version available now since the band wasn't happy with the first version they had to make in a hurry), too bad that the third (Grimborg) moved to a maybe more artistically diverse direction, losing a lot of the natural charm and feel of serendipity at the same time...

concurring with everyone else's praise.......2004-04-01

I just want to put in another 5 star review. I am another who can truly feel the power of the Goddess in this recording. I have also seen Gjallarhorn and they are every bit as amazing in person, so I surely don't think this CD is overproduced-ths songs sound substantially the same live. This is also a good CD for testing new stereo systems because of its dynamic range.

"arise to see the seeds".......2004-01-09

This CD makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. "Suvetar," the album opener, is a 3000-year-old fertility goddess chant-song and gives off magick energy like sparks from a bonfire. From there the CD varies in intensity but never in quality. Jenny Wilhelm's voice is a treasure. It reminds me of Sandy Denny and Maddy Prior simultaneously, and she flies above the band with effortless grace while they pull and roil and flare beneath. The songs are about love in its many forms, and on the liner notes it is claimed that the goddess Sjofn (a love goddess from the Norse tradition) is the "guardian" of this recording.

Maybe that's why this music sounds so untamed and transcendent. It sounds truly pagan, not in a tacky "let's-pretend-like" sense (like so much deliberately "pagan" music) but in a fiery, direct way, tribal and present, vivid and hallucinatory at the same time.

In short "Sjofn" is one of the best "folk" recordings I have ever heard. You can spend a lot of time with this recording and still not discover every nuance. That is true of all the Gjallarhorn I have heard so far, but never more so than with this CD. Beautiful, primitive and fey, "Sjofn" is not to be missed.

Thoroughly entrancing.......2003-07-08

I was first exposed to Gjallarhorn via the World Music Videos program on WorldLinkTV, and of all the many musicians I've found in this way, none has impressed me as much as Gjallarhorn.

It took a few viewings of the video before the song really grabbed me, but when it finally did, there's just so much there -- every listen reveals more. So, too, the rest of the album. The video as well (which is also on the CD) -- it includes some incredible imagery and more layers of symbol and meaning to peel back than I expect ever to fully decipher.

Jenny's voice is incomparable, and the instruments fit with it and one another so well, one wonders why this exact same combination of sounds isn't being used by a thousand other bands. I can't recommend this album highly enough.

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