AUDIO REVIEW: Sinikka Langeland: Starflowers

New Age fans will be exalted by the lulling, worshipful songs of Norwegian folksinger Sinikka Langeland. Accompanied by discreetly jazzy players on the saxophone, trumpet, and double bass, Sinikka’s musical incantations, recalling the pure sounds of singers such as Enya and Deva Premal, are set to poems by her compatriot, the woodcutter and writer Hans Børli (1918–1989). Unlike other nature-inspired writers such as Whitman and Thoreau, to whom he is often compared, Børli actually spent his entire life in woodlands. Sinikka’s songs are imbued with a shamanistic view of nature and inspired by runes, the magical signs used for divination in the Middle Ages. Sinikka elicits inspiration from the eastern Norway area of Finnskogen, a densely forested region that is rich in myths and wildlife. There, she is drawn to music with a “sense of space and nature and timelessness,” as she told one journalist. She strums on the kantele, a Baltic zither that, according to legend, charmed forest animals with its beautiful sound. “Whispers in the Cotton Grass” reminds us that “life isn’t just ten thousand plodding steps toward petty goals,” despite all the “busy people with pay packets and wristwatches [who] are so stingy with the minutes.” A spiritual solution is found in “Deep in the Forest,” where even the “deepest riddles surely will be solved.”