“Being in a room with Sinikka Langeland is like being charmed into a northern forest under a night sky,” wrote Fiona Talkington in Songlines. “Her presence and her voice are magical, but when she plays her kantele you can almost feel nature itself quivering with joy.”

The expressive arc of Sinikka’s music extends from the archaic to the experimental. Rooted in folk forms but wide-open in its perspectives it demands – and on Wind and Sun gets – particularly resourceful interpreters. Langeland’s new group is an optimum assembly of Norwegian musicians, each of them an ECM bandleader in his own right, all of them contributing ideas to the ongoing musical conversation – and, as Sinikka says, “taking things further in their incredible improvised solos.”

For her song texts this time, Sinikka turns to the writings of poet and novelist Jon Fosse, one of Norway’s most important contemporary authors. Fosse has described the process of writing as “an act of listening” and wrestles with questions of faith in his work in a way that resonates with Sinikka’s fascination with “natural mysticism”.

Wind and Sun, Sinikka Langeland’s seventh ECM album, was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in September 2022 and mixed at Munich’s Bavaria Tonstudio in March 2023.

1. Row My Ocean
2. Wind And Sun
3. It Walks And Walks
4. When The Heart Is The Moon
5. Hands That Held
6. A Child Who Exists
7. A Window Tells
8. The Love
9. Wind Song
10. A Child Who Exists (var.)
11. Wind And Sun (var)
12. You Hear My Heart Come

The new recording opens on the organically-charged Row My Ocean and the stoically reaching, titular Wind And Sun and then we are graced with the melodically strident It Walks And Walks, the elegant When The Heart Is The Moon and both the emphatically hued Hands That Held and the veritably crystalline A Child Who Exists.

Along next is the emboldened A Window Tells and the melodically sweeping The Love, which are in turn followed by the Eastern-flavored Wind Song, the haunting A Child Who Exists (var.), the album rounding out on the strained Wind And Sun (var.), closing on the opulent stillness within You Hear My Heart Come.

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