In the Northern Hemisphere, north is to the left. Morally and musically the compass of this album is pointing in this direction. With her new album Nord, Rebekka Bakken invites her listeners to travel to that very region, taking us along for a trip to her personal past and into our universal future. Sung mostly in her native Norwegian, “because that is my root, my tongue, my air”, with a bit of English and Arabic woven in, the eleven songs on the album sound as intense as intentional, as intimate as international, always wonderfully spiritual and heartwarming. This organic combination of traditional Folk melodies and all new compositions with deeply psychedelic grooves, handpicked and recorded with a select group of friends, creates a new but timeless flow, drawing us near and carrying us with it, endlessly probing, all the way up north.

 

“Every note, every breath, all of me is in this album”, says Rebekka Bakken. “I really felt that I need to give everything I have and hold nothing back.” The internationally renowned and revered singer and songwriter, born in Oslo and living there again today after influential stints in New York and Vienna, has lived with these songs since her childhood. For the most part they represent a Norwegian songbook she associates with “the sound of my mother’s voice, the echo of church walls.” They are prayers, laments, cries and lullabies that have always been around her and are deeply ingrained in her subconscious. “I carried them with me without thinking about them”, she says. “I didn’t value them then. But later in life, they started to come back, full of their own power, asking to be expressed. It took years before I felt ready to let them out in the way I truly heard them.”

 

In truth, Rebekka Bakken waited until the right constellation of people was there, musicians who could channel and expand the essence of the songs with their own voices. When that moment came, “we didn’t need long rehearsals. We trusted the material and each other and let instinct lead us.” In just four days in the Kongshavn studio, Rebekka Bakken and her musical cohorts recorded this equally mystical and magical music: Rune Arnesen on drums, pianist Stein Austrud, who also produced and mixed these songs with Rebekka, Eivind Aarset on electric guitar, Svein Schultz on electric bass, as well as poignant guest appearances by Hildegunn Øiseth on goat horn as well as vocalists Saleh Mahfoud and Simon Issát Marainen.

 

The themes of these songs are universal and ubiquitous – longing, loving, doubting, searching poems and life-stories that ring true with the rhythms of humanity. And even though the traditionals may stem from religious sources, what matters most for Rebekka Bakken is what these songs symbolize – something that can be found in music itself. “And really, it is simple”, she concludes: “It’s just life, nothing more and nothing less.” For as long as Rebekka Bakken has lived and breathed this music – as a daughter, as a mother and partner – it is obvious from the start that she is not singing it for memories. “NORD is not an archive”, she emphasises, “it is a heartbeat. It is my way of turning tradition into pulse. Of making the old vibrate again, not as heritage, but as living ritual. These songs do not belong to the past. They belong to the body, the breath, the now.” By reimagining them the singer also wanted to reignite them, or as she says: “to let them move, breathe, and dance in the now – sometimes fragile as a whisper, sometimes vast and thunderous.”

 

As somewhat of a centrepiece, My Choicest Hours lies in the middle of the album. The song, as Rebekka Bakken says, “unfolds in English, because that language gave me the distance to leave the familiar behind and step into something more open.” Based on the words of the Sufi poet Rabia al- Basri, it is a beautiful opportunity to present the voice of Syrian singer Saleh Mahfoud. “The moment his voice comes in feels raw, hypnotic, wide like the night sky”, Rebekka says. “Our voices meet. Saleh Mahfoud’s voice is angelic, caressing, and carrying at the same time. Singing with him gave the music a rare symbiosis – two voices intertwining, creating something larger than either of us alone. I still get goosebumps when I hear his voice within these songs.” “I have always loved the sound of Arabic – the way of singing, the scales, the rhythm”, Rebekka says. “It has spoken to me for as long as I can remember. Including it here felt natural, because it is in my own roots that I find connection to the rest of the world.” It is a moment when Nord opens its arms to something larger. A feeling that comes full circle in yet another vocal meeting, this time on the traditional Ingen Vinner frem til den Evige Ro (None Shall Reach Eternal Rest), featuring Joik singer Simon Issát Marainen. “His voice has a fantastic texture, magically stirring, and when it joins mine, it touches that same spring. Both of them bring another dimension into these songs.”

 

Nord is clearly much more than the sum of its parts, sometimes poetic, often volcanic. It is an exceptional album that reaches deep into the core of our common spirituality and comes up with a timeless yet timely message of unspoken, maybe even unspeakable human energy and communality. At most times, Nord even carries that raw edge that connects Norwegian folk tunes with the African American tradition. “These songs come from a landscape that doesn’t forgive”, Rebekka knows. “The Blues is not far away from that spirit: suffering that insists on becoming beauty.” It is in this kind of beauty, that we as listeners can feel our own truth – simple sensations of the absurdity and meditations on the meaning of life.