The Norwegian Hytta Trio is led by innovative Hardanger fiddler Anne Hytta, and features double bass player Jo Skaansar and percussionist Ulrik Ibsen Thorsrud (who plays on tin foil, glockenspiel, and bass drum). The trio began working in 2018 when they composed and performed music for the theater production Tvisyn about the poet Aasmund Olavsson Vinje (1818–1870). Since then, the trio has been exploring Norwegian traditional music, searching for material and motifs to inspire new music with room for improvisation.

Vindespel (Twining Tunes) is the trio’s debut album, suggesting a natural flow to its music, like a meandering river between danceable, circular tunes and slow, contemplative melodies. The trio relies on Hytta’s rich Hardanger fiddle tradition from Telemark, but spices and spins the local Norwegian folk music with other folk traditions, jazz, and free improvisation. The trio imagines its music as articulating the duality between dream-like, spacious landscapes and dark, dense forests.

Vindespel was produced by the experimental multi-instrumentalist Anders Sundsteigen Hana, known from the alternative bands Noxagt, Ultralyd, Moha!, and Naaljos Ljom, and takes Hardanger fiddle music into freer, more spontaneous territory. The ten story-like pieces leave enough space for spontaneous ideas and individual voices, and explore the meditative, deep, resonant string dynamics of Hytta and Skaansar as they search with Thorsrud for new, subtle timbral possibilities and seductive pulses.

Eyal Hareuveni

Anne Hytta (hardanger fiddle), Jo Skaansar (double bass), Ulrik Ibsen Thorsrud (percussion)