What do black metal and folk have in common? More than you might think

For most music fans, the distance between heavy metal and folk is so vast you’d get a laugh – or possibly into a fight – for even suggesting a link.

But not for Einar Selvik.

The former drummer in Gorgoroth – an infamous Norwegian black metal band known for staging mock crucifixions and impaling sheep heads on stage – spent years pumping out some of the most high-energy rock on the planet, becoming a leader in a genre that happily admits it’s an outlier even in the metal world.

Seven years’ research and experimentation by Einar Selvik (centre) led to his folk project Wardruna.Credit: Morten Munthe

Controversial but hugely successful, Gorgoroth have spent more than 30 years playing festivals throughout Europe and releasing albums including Pentagram (1994), Antichrist (1996), Under the Sign of Hell (1997) – and yes, there’s a definite theme to the band’s catalogue.

But at the same time, Selvik wondered how the rhythms and sounds of his Nordic past had evolved next to what he was playing. So he decided to find out.

“During the early 2000s I started doing a lot of research into the type of instruments that used to be, and what we know, or what we think we know, about the music that was played on them,” Selvik, 44, says. “I found it’s quite a fragmented jigsaw, we only have bits and pieces of information.”

What he did find, through years of detective work and talking with experts and academics, showed there was a definite link to the present, and that a lot of musical genres have common roots – even folk and black metal.

“That’s the thing,” Selvik says. “When you go far enough back in time, you see that the similarities are more prominent than the differences.

“The tonality, the rhythmic patterns, even the instruments … it’s almost like some of these things are in our DNA in a way, and I think that’s why a lot of people do connect to it. It’s just very familiar.”

The next step was to bring that music back to life, so after seven years of research, making some extinct instruments from scratch (which led to some “very crappy” failures, Selvik says with a laugh), the result was a new band, Wardruna.

Meaning “the guardian of the runes” (or possibly “wisdom”, or “secrets” – it’s a word that doesn’t exactly translate), the band’s first album, released in 2009, featured Einar and bandmates Gaahl (also ex-Gorgoroth) and former punk/electronica musician Lindy-Fay Hella using resurrected Stone Age, Bronze Age, Viking period and medieval instruments including goat horns, deer-hide drums and uniquely Nordic instruments like the kraviklyra and tagelharpa (both ancient stringed instruments), layered with haunting vocals including chants, throat-singing and more, to recreate music that had not been heard in centuries.

Driving, ethereal and haunting, Wardruna immediately found an audience that loved the sounds they didn’t even know they had been missing.

“It was not something I anticipated,” Selvik admits, “and it wasn’t on my radar at all. This was just something that I couldn’t not do.”

Since then, and despite a deliberately small output – Wardruna restrict the number of gigs they play and have released only five albums in 20 years, including three based on Norse runes and one based on the attributed sayings of the Norse god Odin – the band has built a worldwide following.

“I would like to say just how moving it is to see how diverse our audience is,” says Selvik.

“You have people bring their kids and their grandparents, you have everything from metal fans to people who normally go to the opera or jazz club, all ethnicities are represented … It’s just such a powerful thing.”

In 2013 that power exploded when Selvik was asked to help score the music for the global hit TV series Vikings.

Suddenly the sounds of Wardruna were everywhere and once again, as Selvik suspected it would, the same chord of familiarity was struck.

This summer those world-spanning songs are coming to Australia and New Zealand for Wardruna’s first tour to this region.

For Selvik it’s a chance not only to showcase the music he has helped rediscover, but also to learn.

“The Australian Aboriginal culture was, of course, a huge inspiration in many ways when I started on this project,” he says.

“Because when you’re searching in the ruins of your own very fragmented history, it’s only natural that you look to other indigenous cultures, both neighbouring and on a global scale … and what you find is that the similarities are again much more common than the dissimilarities.

“Actually, the Bronze Age lur [a 2m-long wind instrument Wardruna use] can be played with the same technique as a didgeridoo,” he says.“That is fascinating to me.”

Wardruna play the Palais in Melbourne on January 23 and the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, on January 25.