Instinkt

Sometimes you think you have a band pegged, and they take you by surprise. Instinkt did just that when they issued their second album, Grum (Go! Danish Folk Music) last year. Their 2002 debut, Hur!, had a slight edge to it, but from the first note Grum is blood music, full-throated and wild.

"It's an idea we had with Finn Jansen, our producer and sound engineer, of trying to make an album with him completely in charge of the recordings and how we'd sound," explains singer/fiddler/guitarist Søren Korshøj. "On the first album everyone had their opinion, so this is a different kind of co-operation."

"He chose the songs to give one picture," adds fiddler and singer Louise Ring Vansgaard. "The first album was several pictures, but this time we thought a special feeling and sound. This is the dark side of Instinkt."

And dark it is indeed, often having more in common with the shadowy sounds of Sweden or Finland than their homeland. But that was deliberate, says Martin Seeberg, who plays viola, hurdy gurdy, jaw harp and sings, because "we don't really want to be categorised. We're Danish because we're somewhere between Finland and Ireland, so I guess those are the influences that came in. We didn't think we had to sound particularly Danish. I think we could call it Nordic, it has a Nordic core."

"We have absolutely no rules about what we can do," agrees drummer and percussion Vivi Di Bap. "We try to be open-minded and forget about other bands and the things we've heard. We're free to do whatever we want."

It's just their second album in six years together, after forming in 2000 to play a festival. Their 2002 debut, Hur!, showed a skilled band moving in directions, and bassist Malene Beck notes that "we had to find our feet first. The first concert we played we only had a few weeks to rehearse, and after that we had to consolidate all the music and find out which direction we wanted to take from there."

After that they began to focus, a long process since Instinkt is only a part-time band for the members. "We worked so much making this kind of music and developing a sound no one else has," Seeberg recalls. "It takes us a long time to put together a number, sometimes two or three years before we felt it worked right. And there's a lot of material we worked with and didn't end up using it. We all compose an in different ways."

"About half it we tried out before we went in the studio," Vansgaard continues. "But we also wanted half of it to be material no one had heard live, so we had a mix of the new and the more familiar."

They tried out some of the new songs in 2004 at the Roskilde festival, where they won over an audience there for rock'n'roll. But that's hardly surprising. To see Seeberg tear open his hurdy gurdy, bending strings and putting the sound through effects is a jaw-dropping experience, a kind of roaring folk-metal machine. It let them know they were on the right track.

"The idea was to make an album where the silent pieces are really silent and not over-produced, just minimal," Korshøj notes. "We wanted to take everything as far as we could, to the extreme."

And they've succeeded. At the heart of it all is the relentless drumming of Di Bap, who might be the Tony Allen of Danish drumming, hands and feet flying over the kit, and adding the otherwordly Tuvan-inflected vocables toYummi Yah. But she plays down her role a little, merely saying that "it varies. I never played folk music before this band, so that's not my reference.Martin made a tune where I tried to follow his drum idea, so maybe that's why it sounds different from what a drummer would normally do, because it's a not a drummer who had the idea. That's exciting because it gives a new sound to the band."

In many ways Instinkt have become the heirs of Sorten Muld, who broke new ground in Danish folk a decade ago (Seeberg was a member), mixing electronica and acoustic instruments on Nordic tunes and ballads. There's a similar sensibility to the sound, as Korshøj readily acknowledges.

"Going back we have a lot of old Danish tunes in minors. But they've been ignored. If you look, the very old Danish tunes, Swedish tunes and Irish tunes are more or less the same. Sorten Muld played a lot of medieval stuff."

With this album, Seeberg says, "we'd like to get on rock music stages, so people can see instruments they haven't seen before, then they can go back and discover where it came from. In that way, I think we have a mission to build some bridges."

But don't expect a follow up anytime soon. As Vansgaard points out, "we'll never be a band that makes a CD every year because we take our time over the material."

"We're all songwriters, and we're democratic, so it takes time to try every idea," Di Bap concurs. "But when it fits, it's really great."

And for the next few years "we're going to enjoy travelling," says Korshøj. "In the places we've been, like Belgium and Canada, the 'folk music' term is much wider than it is in Denmark. If you tell anyone here you play folk music they have very narrow ideas of what it sounds like. So I think we fit into the profile of a lot of international folk."

Instinkt

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