As I described in my last post for this series, Towards the Within, I have decided to do a bit of discovery when it comes to music and report back what I found on that adventure. Briefly: I seeded a “radio station” on YouTube Music with several darkwave and experimental folk bands, set it at high discovery and high artist variety. I tried to give preference in my “seed” to non-English-speaking artists to drive the algorithm in that direction. And then, I set off a darkened path and into the labyrinthine woods I had just created.
Did I find something interesting in the deep woods? Or did the monsters eat me?
And so far, I’ve run into very little music with which I am familiar. Some of that seems to be that the “radio station” is leaning into true indie music, which I appreciate. You might ask me how the quality has been? Well, some of it is very roughly produced and could use lots more polish. Bands can be too close to their own music to engineer and produce it in a manner that brings out their true talents. Or they lack the software/hardware to add that polish. While I didn’t skip many songs, there were a few so far that not only failed to get a like, but were disliked and skipped.
the first, kind of
One of the first songs that really made my ears perk up caught me by surprise. The song sounded familiar in an unfamiliar way, if that makes sense. A modern van nomad named Tal Barr was listed as the artist.
The song that caught my attention was “If I Had a Heart”, but Tal seemed too indie of an artist for me to have likely encountered her in my past — although I do listen to plenty of obscure bands.
As I dug deeper, it became clear that this was from her first album, which contained a number of covers and traditional songs. Heart was one of those songs and I quickly realized where I had heard a version of it before: while watching The Vikings, a historical television drama based on the life of Ragnar Lodbrok.
The original version of the song was written and performed by the artist Fever Ray. And that version grabbed me more. That’s no slight to Tal, but Fever Ray’s version has more of a haunting quality to it that I can’t get out of my head.
fever ray’s heart
While some of you may be familiar with Fever Ray because of The Vikings or, perhaps, for other reasons (their music has been used in numerous movies and television shows), I was only passingly familiar with their name — likely because I noticed in passing while watching The Vikings on one of my rare bouts of television binging (I rarely watch television, and largely eschew binging). As I read another commenter say elsewhere, I usually skip the beginning credits when I can, but The Vikings was an exception to the norm. I would usually let it play on because I liked the music.
The song is slower in tempo, with an almost tribal feel to the sound. “Haunting” is a perfect description and, while it is sung in English, it does have that northern European vibe to it. In other words, almost exactly the sound I was hoping to hear more of when I first set off on this journey.
In reality, I had forgotten about the song after my interest in the show waned. I always meant to check out the artist behind the song, but never got around to it.
While their version of the song did not appear on my radio, it was through the discovery process that I remembered that I have intended to listen to more. So, by way of Tal Barr (thank you), I have recovered what I had forgotten I had lost. The labyrinth works in weird ways.
I’m going to modify my discovery process to see if it iterates into something really cool by removing the previous one artist from the seed and adding the one or two that caught my attention.
After you listen to If I had a Heart, please give me your impressions and thoughts in the comments below.
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