The magical forest

"Perhaps the most endearing quality of The Magical Forest, its center, so to speak, is Langeland's kantele playing. Her Finnish table harp bridges jazz improvisation and folk song in "Beaver," and illustrates the reach of Finnskogen from Western Europe to its outlying connections in Siberia and even Japan in "Kamu," and underscores the inseparable relationship in this music between vocalists and instrumentalists on "Pillar to Heaven." Langeland takes chances on The Magical Forest. She allows improvisers a greater degree of freedom. In turn, they extend the reach of her songs from the historical past to the present without erasing their folklore. By involving Trio Medieval, she invites a more fluid yet constant relationship between the physical and metaphysical. Together they illustrate the universal aspects of Finnskogen culture in global symbolism and myth".

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"Norwegian singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland leads her Norwegian-Finnish-Swedish Starflowers quintet through a series of songs built upon myths and legends from Finnskogen, the forested area in eastern Norway bordering Sweden ... The quintet is augmented by the singers of the Trio Mediaeval, giving the folkloric element in Langeland's fusion of traditional and contemporary music a bit more emphasis than on previous albums ... [The band members are all] bandleaders in their own right. But here they are all focused on creating a group sound, which includes Langeland's kantele, [which] has become more prominent in the improvised sections as her instrumental confidence has grown ... There are only two songs here that borrow directly from traditional sources ... But Langeland is so immersed in the sounds of the forest and the history of the region that there is no clear line between her original music and her roots".

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"Another beautiful set from the Norwegian folk singer and Finnish-harp specialist Sinikka Langeland ... Themed around the ancient heaven-meets-earth concept of the axis mundi, it's a stream of entrancing sound in which long, ringing harp tones drift across vocal laments and thudding low drumbeats. Trygve Seim's shy sax interjections cross restrained bass and drums grooves, and Arve Henriksen unfolds slow motifs with a stately hipness reminiscent, on the rhythmically floating Jacob's Dream, of the Miles Davis Sketches of Spain classic Solea ... It's a folk album, sung in Langeland's Finnskogen dialect, but so open to jazz conversations that its audience stretches far wider".

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