HÉR

“Hér” in Icelandic means „here”. It is a very clear calling from the band to the audience: be here, experience, be inspired, it is happening now, and it is the essence of participating in our artistic expression. The bad was formed in Gdańsk, northern Poland. Five independent, strong musical personalities met “here”—in a specific place and time—to create communitas that are both unique and harmonious.

The music they propose carries the listener to 11th-century Old Norse wisdom poetry. The first inspiration for this artistic meeting were the poems of the Poetic Edda. Hér reveals wild, root-like, undiscovered musical spaces, the clash of worlds, and a glimpse of the otherworld. It uses raw means of expression and sounds, as raw as the North itself: trembling throat singing, increasing trance-like rhythm, gliding over the violin strings like over an ice surface. We start here: Iceland, the beginning of Europe. It is a musical meditation on a place, growing out of specific soil, reaching to the roots of Norse mythology but not stopping there. It is not only the wisdom of the Vikings, Odin’s recommendations for those who stand at the gates of Valhalla. The threshold of the otherworld leads further to universal, human, fundamental experiences.

By exploring the human nature described in Norse mythology, the musicians make a deep insight into the emotions embedded in its verses. They bring out the dark beauty of the North and its extremes: fire and ice, violence and tenderness, bravery and care, the brutality of war and the solace that peace brings, struggle and feast, the milky sweetness of honey and the salty tang of blood, love and hatred, birth and death, beginning and end, terror and awe…