Starflowers is the ECM debut of the Norwegian singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland, released in June 2007. She sets thirteen poems by the lumberjack-poet Hans Børli (1918-1989). Langeland is a folk singer from the forest lands near the Swedish border, and her work keeps returning to that landscape. Folk song, sung poetry and Nordic improvisation meet here on equal terms, in music about the relationship between people and nature.
Langeland was born in 1961 in Kirkenær, in south-eastern Norway. She took up the kantele, the 39-string Finnish table harp, in 1981, and it became her main instrument beside her voice. After her studies she worked on a research project into the archives of old songs from Finnskogen. For this album she gathered a quintet with trumpeter Arve Henriksen, saxophonist Trygve Seim, bassist Anders Jormin and percussionist Markku Ounaskari. It was recorded in May 2006 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with Jan Erik Kongshaug, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
The poems come from We Own the Forests and Other Poems, published in English by Norvik Press in 2005, and are sung in Norwegian. Høstnatt på Fjellskogen opens with Langeland bending pitches on the kantele to paint an autumn night. In Det er ei slik natt her voice stands almost alone against Jormin's harmonics. The closing Har du lyttet til elvene om natta? brings Seim's soprano saxophone and the bass together over the kantele, in a slow river image that fades like an organ. Several shorter pieces, such as Sølv and Støv, are instrumentals built on kantele ostinatos.
The response was warm across Europe. Ray Comiskey of The Irish Times praised the quintet as "superb" and called the record "one of the albums of this or any other year". In Norway, Vårt Land noted how the voices of Seim and Henriksen melt together with Langeland's folk tunes into a new, rich expression. Writing in Jazzpodium, Heribert Ickerott heard a fusion of post-folk and contemporary jazz, with the two horns turning her melodic motifs into hymns over Jormin's bass.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1996, first released on 5 June 2007. Its credits name Louis Muinzer as translator of the poems.
