Interview mit Christine Kammerer

Christine Kammerer released „Echoes of North“ – we talked about the album and a lot of other things

Good morning, Christine, you released the album „Echoes of North“ last month. You’ve already got a lot of other things on the way before that. There have been many experiences, projects, concerts, ideas and development processes that I would like to talk to you about today.

How are you today?
I am good. Everything has been a bit of a whirlwind for the past couple of months. I’m just about to go on tour, but it’ll be amazing. I can’t wait.

You will go on tour with “Whisky and Witches” or with your own songs and your new album?
In July I’ll go on tour in Denmark with my band JOTUNGER, and we just did a full band version of “Whisky and Witches” in Copenhagen with JOTUNGER and Alison McNeil and Fiona McNeil from my album. So with my dark folk project JOTUNGER I will have four Viking festivals in Denmark across July. And then in August, I’ll, we’ll have eight shows of “Whisky and Witches” at the Fringe in Edinburgh.

Wow. A lot to do. When preparing for the interview, I already thought there is a lot to talk about.You’re a singer and a composer, you play many instruments and have your Viking band, JOTUNGER, and you have been in the project “Raven Brings Runes”. And what I also like very much: you covered “The Dragonborn Comes”. And now you have your album “Echoes of North” and with “Whisky and Witches” an exciting idea for a whisky tasting.
As I got to know you through your music, I would like to start with some questions about your music first.

Her grandfather got her into playing music

How did you get into music? Are you from a musical family, or how did music become so important for you?
Well, yes, I come from a music family. And the reason why this interview is also quite important to me is that a lot of my family come from Bavaria, from Rosenheim. And it was my granddad who got me into playing music.
He was a folk musician and a composer as well. His name was Edwin Kammerer. He grew up in Rosenheim. Then he met my grandmother and moved to Denmark. They started a music school and I basically have lived at that music school. So I started playing piano when I was five or six and then started singing when I was around eight, got into a choir, had my first solo song when I was 11, which was yesterday. And then from there, I didn’t know how to not do music. So I studied music at high school and boarding school, what we in Denmark call Højskolen. I studied musical theatre, dance, singing. And then I went on to musicology at university.

What idea or intention did you have when you decided to study musicology?
 I’ve always been very taken by how music acts as an agent in society, what it can do to us interculturally and between, between people.

And your projects somehow all have to do with this idea.
Yes, I’ve done a lot of projects, and it has to do with how music creates bridges between different cultures and different people.

 And how did it come to make music your profession?
I think that’s one of the reasons why I studied musicology, because I always thought, I want to work with music.  But if I can’t live off performing, at least I want an academic background that allows me to work with it on a higher level and continue that work my entire life.

Have you often wondered whether this is possible?
Honestly, I went through a lot of doubting. But when I went out of university, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to curate cultural heritage through music.

 “Hi, can you play weird instruments and come and do that full-time?”

What ideas did you have?
I wanted to make history come alive with music and I wanted to tell stories. So in 2018, I went on quest to find some musicians who wanted to do a Viking music project with me. And, and that’s how I found the musicians for GJALDULEI. A couple of years ago we decided to go in different directions. And we restructured the band and renamed it JOTUNGER.
So I started that and then, because, you know, there’s not a museum that has a post that says, “Hi, can you play weird instruments and come and do that full-time?” So I needed to do that myself.

JOTUNGER is now one of the best-known Viking bands in Denmark.
Yes, we played quite a few times at the National Museum. And we play a lot of different festivals.

When did you start to write music?
I’ve been writing since I was 15. And I still got some of those old songs. It was everything from a couple of the first real performances with my own music I played was at a small venue, a small bar in Denmark. And it’s just me and my guitar, and I just played some songs from the EP that I released in 2020.

So you can’t do without music because you are full of music?
I don’t know how to not play music. It’s not something I do, it’s something I am. And it’s the way I relate to the world and how I create connections with people. And it feels like this is what I can give the world. And I will keep giving it as long as I have something in me.

I believe that all people have music in them in one way or another. And that music is a good way to communicate with others and feel connected.  And that musicians show how this is possible.  How it is possible to communicate and understand each other without words.
Yeah, I totally love the way you talk about it.

I would like to come back to your Viking band JOTUNGER. There are a lot of discussions about how Viking music sounds like. A lot of people think that we can’t say how it sounded.
We don’t know how it sounds and so on. But I think it’s not so important. It’s how I understand it.

Just as an archaeologist cannot always be one hundred per cent sure that what he thinks about the finds is correct?
Yes. My background is in ethnomusicology. It is to understand cultural and collective identity and how that’s discussed through music and how it’s communicated through music. So my approach to Viking Age music is qualified guesswork.
We’re weaving a tapestry or a mosaic of the different influences we can find. So part of it is immersing yourself in the culture. And that’s why Viking, participating in Viking festivals are such a big part of what we do. Often, we sit in the environments and play our instruments to see what comes out.

“Music is something I am “

Christine told about her specialization in the lyre and the use of natural instruments in cultural and ritual contexts. And about understanding music more as something you use for a specific purpose rather than entertainment, even if it was entertainment. She collects old Scandinavian folk songs and continues her research in Scotland, where she plans a journey to the Shetland and Orkney Islands to study Norse, Celtic, and Pictish cultures.She explores old music traditions and scales, sometimes  based on bone flute findings, incorporating these influences into her music. When composing, she intuitively feels when the music is right.

She said: “If I try to force it into being something it’s not, I close. If it feels right, I open and I can lean into it. I had a song that I wrote last year at Moesgård Viking Moot in Aarhus, Denmark, and I was paid four pieces of amber to write music for a ship that was about to set out to sea. And I sat down at the beach, and I looked at the ship and I felt into. Okay, so what kind of spirits and gods and goddesses do you have to invoke to stay safe on a ship like that? Then I thought about, there’s an old folk song from Shetland that is a combination of Old Norse and a dialect from Shetland. And I thought, okay, what are they telling in that? Well, they’re singing about them having to be aware and how they need to navigate the ship. And then I thought, okay, if I build on that with some Norse gods, then I wrote the song in an hour, I think.”

She has also been working with the Scottish Crannog Centre in Kenmore and wrote songs for the opening.

Empowerment through music

Another project she is proud of is Joyous Choir, that emerged from an integration project. Women from different countries who sang together, literally just used their voice to communicate and convey feeling about things we all have in common as human beings: love, connection, community, home, and belonging.

Christine told about it: “And then I took all of those recordings and I picked out the different tonal structures that went through it and brought together a composition that we performed at the opening of the Scottish Crannog Centre. It’s called “Becoming Anew”. And it was stunning.”

It must be incredible to witness people coming together like this.
Yes, it was incredible to see how some of these women grew just by doing this composition. They took ownership over it. Even we couldn’t talk to each other properly, it brought us together and they just stood there in full force.

So, it is a kind of empowerment.
Yes, it makes people feel home when they are outside of their own country, of their own culture, that they know that they have this power that they can take things in their own hands. And in music, you can show it. You don’t have to talk about it. You can show it and they can feel it.

With JOTUNGER we did our take of Viking music

But back to JOTUNGER. You will do a lot more shows with them. And the idea behind it is like to retain cultural heritage. Did I get it right?           Yeah, definitely. There are many interpretations of Viking music. And with JOTUNGER we did our take on it. We’ve recorded an entire album that. So that’s going to be out this autumn and hopefully we’ll have a single out very soon as well. And we’ll do another one, I think, quite quickly after that, because part of what we do is Viking music, but part of it is something completely different, a lot more dark folk. And almost musical theatre, crossing over to classical or symphonic music folk. And we have an ambition to put heavy metal into the mix of that as well.

You will have Heavy Metal in it?
So, yeah, I used to play heavy metal when I was in my early 20s. I’m a huge metalhead. And I was in a symphonic metal band for four years. And I loved it. And I need to get back to the roots of doing that.Some of this can also be heard in the song „Jeg Kender Et Danmark“ on the new album. Not really heavy metal but that kind of, you know, edge.

A deep diving in traditional folk and grandfather’s influence

On “Echoes of North” you have a lot of beautiful songs. The fusion on Nordic and Celtic music and the storytelling is something new in a way. How did it come to you to do this fusion of Nordic and Celtic music?
Yeah, well, the Celtic has been a part of me for such a long time. And what I wanted to demonstrate there was how close our tonalities are to each other. The song “Dr​ø​mte Mig en Dr​ø​m & Mermaid’s Croon” is a fusion of the oldest Danish folk song and a Gaelic song. Two different songs brought together.
And I think that Scotland and Ireland as well, that type of Celtic music has been part of my life since I was 13, 14. I remember I got the first, the first Celtic Circle CD when I was 13 or 14. I bought it and listened to it five times or something. When I got older, I found Enya, Loreena McKennitt and a lot of others.  And then I started to dive deeper into traditional folk, Irish and Scottish folk

How did this music influence your style of writing music?
Yes, listening to all that Celtic music very much influenced my own style of writing from an early age, but also the way that my granddad wrote. There was something in that when I listened to Celtic music and the compositions that my granddad wrote, I thought there’s some interconnections here that I didn’t notice before.

Can you describe, what kind of connection it was?
My grandfather had arranged a simple melody, a very Nordic sounding thing. If you put a couple of notes on it, it instantly becomes more Celtic. Once you know it, it’s so easy to weave with and play with.
And I think the more I did Viking music, the more I did my own style of writing, which was very, very Celtic music-y. I wanted, one of the reasons I wanted to move to Scotland was to walk in the footsteps of the Vikings from Denmark and Norway in Scotland and in Ireland as well. So it feels like I started scratching the surface of it.

You worked with musicians from Scotland for your album. How did they react to your ideas and compositions?
Yes, I met some amazing Celtic traditional musicians. And I wonder what will happen if I put the Nordic rooted and Celtic rooted things I’ve done into the hands of them. How will they approach it? That was the whole idea behind the album.
And you know, Birgit, the musicians have never played together before they met in studio. I wanted to see what happens, without any bias, without any, what will you bring to this? And it was like we just breathe from the same set of lungs to some degree.

What happens if you put Nordic rooted music into the hand of Celtic musicians

That must have been a great experience.
We weave from the same fabric, just with different colours from different cultures that then have influenced each other in different ways. I almost become emotional talking about this because it’s, especially in a world like today, where it seems like everything’s falling apart a bit. People are getting more and more violent with each other.

Yes, it’s as if something like fragmentation is happening everywhere. Seeing differences is important. But we must not lose sight of what we have in common.
We are dividing each other more and more. Creating these small pockets where we come together, whether that was with the album, whether that was with what I did with the Joyous Choir, gives you hope. It allows you to breathe into a belief in humanity.

Was this thought part of the motivation for the album?
And that’s very much what I wanted to demonstrate with “Echoes of North”. And I will translate the Danish songs into English and put them into reference.

I think when we see what we have in common, it is easier to let people have their own things. Something like the workshop, the choir has shown that there are topics that are very important for everything, they are just expressed differently. I think that music, theatre, art and working together can show that we have more in common than we think. There are some basic things like the willingness to understand, being actively curious and a desire to understand.
And I think that’s why music, food, drink, so powerful because we can get together around those things. And it might, like you say, it might look different. But it is the same.

Musicians who knew how to listen can create otherworldly harmony

You said that the musicians you worked with never played together before and that you have been interested in how they will perform your music. How did it work? Have you been astonished about what happened?
So you know, the musicians I brought from Denmark, I’ve worked with them for years. Hans Christian Molbech, Christan Mohr Levisen, Adam McKenzie, he’s a Dane as well. We just understand each other, whenever we worked together.I’ve been so lucky to find musicians who very easily reach each other and me. It comes to me in a way that I can lean into in music. And I had the same feeling with Alison and Fiona McNeill and never met Scott Figgins, the bagpiper, before we were in the studio.

What do you think contributed to the fact that the collaboration worked so well?
I trusted the recommendations of people I knew, and I trusted my gut feeling. I brought together musicians who were not only extraordinary artists but knew how to listen. They knew how to be with each other and lean into each other. And I think I, I remember there was especially a time on “Carry Me Home” where the cellist and the violinist, Adam and Alison, came together and created this otherworldly harmony piece for the chorus.

It must have been wonderful to hear your idea realised in this way.
When I heard it, I broke down in tears. And it’s the same with “Mythical Lamentations”. We didn’t play “Mythical Lamentations” more than once or twice before we recorded it all together.
I think the take you hear on the album was the second take we did. And that for me it was the high heights of what happens when you put great artists together in the same room who have a willingness to listen and lean into each other. And I can’t wait to make more of that.

In other words, it’s about listening, not thinking too much, but empathising?
It only works in this way. And that was really incredibly powerful. And we played some of the songs at Copenhagen with “Whiskey and Witches”. Otherworldly experience. I sat there and I thought, aha, this is why I do what I do. It is just otherworldly. And even if you only listen to the to the album, you can feel it.

….to leave music in the hands of others – recording and mastering

Oh, I think it’s full of life. It’s not so ‘polished’.
It has to be lively and not everything absolutely perfect in some way. It has to be full of this connection. And that’s so great.

I think that with Gavin Paterson, who was responsible for recording, and Kjell Braaten, who did the mastering, you found exactly the right people for this album.
Yes, the reason I chose Gavin and Kjell was the exact same reason. I it’s a very fragile and very vulnerable thing to bleed your heart out like that in music. And they have the same way listening and doing music. Kjell hears what comes over and he can let it be, I think. And he also he contributed with some of his amazing instruments to the album.
I personally need to feel safe and heard 100 percent by the people I leave my music in the hands of. Gavin and Kjell know how to do that. And the way they know how to talk to me about my music and how to bring out what I want to bring out without saying it made me feel so much at home.

What else has made this „feeling at home“, being safe, possible for you?
I could really just break, you know, break free, break out. And when I finished recording my vocals and I just bent forward because I was so exhausted. I was so out of breath. And Gavin said: “I don’t know how you do that. I don’t know how you keep that level of energy.”

A fire inside and songs hard to write

And where do you get your energy from?
I feel like I have a fire inside that stands like this all the time.  and depending on how safe I feel, I will feel like I am. O if I can unleash my fire and be relaxed, then I fee I can live my full artistic potential.

That’s a great picture. But what about the stories? You used words, you used stories. What kind of stories did you use for this album?
Oh, yeah, that’s a good question. The songs on this album are about home, about connecting to home. And I didn’t realise that until I brought it all together. I followed my intuition; I followed what I wanted to do.

About being at home in Danmark and Scottland? Feeling home in the Nordic and Celtic music?
I knew that it had to be rooted in the roots of Celtic and Nordic with my other influences on it. So “In the Old Town”, that’s written about feeling at home in, you know, in an old town where the stones sing a song of long ago, where you feel a calmness that you can’t really describe. You breathe in a different way.
“I Dag Bryder Lyset Frem” Is perhaps one of the ones that was the hardest to write, but the most satisfying. It’s about certain people in my family and myself who have suffered from mental health issues and trauma in a lot of ways. Where that song specifically says, I know you’re going through this right now.I know it’s fragile. I know you’re hurting. But someday the light will break through, and you will find your home. It’s where that part of your story ends. And one of my favourite lines from that song is, a whole new era will be burst in the reverb from the old one. So the echo will stop at some point. But your birth will start in the echo of the era you just left.

So “Echoes of North” are not just the reverberation of the North?
These are the old songs, that’s lingering on. So I try to do that both with the stories, both with the music. If you take part of and listen all the way thorough from “Mythical Lamentations Part 1” to “Drømte Mig en Drøm & Mermaids Croon“, those four songs are created to get you into this space and be together.

Yeah, that’s what I felt about it, that they are connected. And, when I listen to the album, I must have heard these songs together before I stop.            Oh, that’s nice. That’s good to hear. That’s how it works. I think, yes.

About harvesting songs and being a conductor

It sounds as if you don’t ‚make‘ the stories and songs, but they come to you.
Yeah, what I usually say is that I go around the world harvesting stories. They have a life of their own. Like, I’m just a conductor.
Some stories you have to leave alone for a while because they’re not ready. It’s like they’re sitting there like a stubborn child and saying: “Five more minutes on my Gameboy, please”. You have to leave them alone because you can feel when a song needs to be taken and saying, okay, I will put myself in this room and I will not leave it until I’ve finished this.

So you see it as more of a task to give them a framework in which they can develop?
I have to place myself in the right surroundings where the stories can actually blossom, I think it’s the finest task for me to do. Because if I’m in the right place and they go through different stages, I will go outside perhaps and have a walk and then I’ll start harvesting melodies. You know, I’ll just go around, I’ll be relaxed in my head and the melodies start popping from different places and then I capture them.Sometimes there’ll be words in those melodies and then sometimes I’ll pick those words out. And then at some point I need to sit in a place, and I need to figure out what’s in this melody.

But there is always an idea, a feeling behind it.
Yes, an idea, a feeling. And so you have to look up what the music brings. It’s funny because I think more often than not, when I sing a specific melody, yeah, the story pops up.

This is another beautiful picture and a fitting end to this interview.

Pictures and stories not only play an important role on your album, but also when you want to bring history to life with JOTUNGER. And not least on „Whisky and Witches“, where you accompany a whisky tasting with stories and songs.

So, thank you very much for the interview so far!

“Whisky and Witches” – more about these incredible idee for a whisky tasting

And for all curious, whisky-loving metal heads:If you want to find out more about „Whisky and Witches“, the tasting, the creation of this format, the stories and also the history of women in the whisky industry past and present and the question of what witches have to do with it, then check back here in the next few days!

More about Christine Kammerer HERE and her Album „Echoes of North“ THERE