Forgotten songs from the Danish heath - Captured on wax rolls in the early 1900. Basis for New Music by Martin Ottosen and Ulla Bendixen (2/3 of the folktronica band Sorten Muld)

A hundred years from now on the brink of a new era you would still find fragments of the old world’s legends and songs in desolate regions on the Danish heath. As dusk came and afterthoughts crept from the darkness into the simple houses scattered across the heather landscape the humble residents would gather in the scant light wool-knitting while quietly singing the tales of evil fate and tender love they themselves had heard sung in the same twilight by the generations before.

From his simple clerk house in Gjellerup folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen went on solitary journeys on foot along wet ruts through the heather hunting ballads. With hasty handwriting in sparse light he collected what he heard in the humble homes hoping that songs and tales could be kept alive on paper before the last voices faded.

Years later, he returned now accompanied by young enthusiasts dragging on the finest technology of the time hoping to keep the weathered faces and raw voices alive on glass plates and wax rolls. The simple farmers of the heath sang fragments of their songs into the soft wax on the valuable rolls of Edison’s Phonograph.

At the Royal Library in Copenhagen songs and faces is now safely stored in dark archives. And the rolls with voices in wax cloned to the latest technology of changing times are waiting for that day they are brought into the light of a new era.

We have now selected a handful of songs where text or melody stand out and resonate in us. We let the forgotten voices from the heath sing again in duets with our singer, Ulla as small vignettes and as lead singers. We rephrase and compose new material around the old recordings, gently towards the simultaneously present and distant in the voices of wax.