ARTIST.ACTRESS.MOTHER.REBEL.
An old painting hangs on the wall of the compact, one-storey house an hour’s drive out of Copenhagen that Amalie Bruun calls home. It depicts a blonde girl lost in reverie as she walks a grass path high above a fjord: a scene that’s elemental and ethereal at the same time.
The picture, by noted Norwegian landscape artist Hans Dahl, belonged to Amalie’s late grandmother, a refined woman who smoked cigarettes from an ivory holder and drank gin and tonic on a Friday morning. Amalie’s mother used to say that it was Amalie in the painting. It’s not hard to see why.
“I had a connection to it from before I can remember,” says Amalie today, as we sit at a dining table in a living room that’s one part uncluttered Scandinavian stylishness, one part hygge-style cosiness. “The album sounds like the painting looks.”
The album she’s referring to is Folkesange, her third as Myrkur, the one-woman black metal project she founded in the mists of the early 2010s.
Where Myrkur’s past releases have bridged worlds – black metal, post-rock, blackgaze, classical – is different. This is traditional Scandinavian music played on traditional Scandinavian instruments, sung predominantly in Danish. There are. Folk Songs.
