Nortfalke - 2021 - Moonjeie

 

Heidens Hart – H H173  164.50MB FLAC

The cover appears to be made from darkness patiently divided into particles. Tall tree trunks crowd the foreground, their branches knitting together overhead while a pale route of snow bends upward through the forest toward a full moon. No creature is visibly waiting among the trees, yet the composition produces the persistent sensation that something has moved just beyond recognition. The open snow resembles a path, river or clearing, but following it would require walking directly into the brightest and most exposed part of the image. Simon Garðarsson created the scene through his painstaking “dark pointillism,” building light, shadow and depth from countless marks of black ink. That technique belongs perfectly beside Nortfalke’s music. Small repeated electronic pulses gradually combine into an environment whose total scale becomes visible only after one has remained inside it for a while.

Moonjeie means “Moonhunter” in a local northern dialect, and the album restores a narrative creature to the abstract dimensions explored on Atmosfeer. That earlier record moved through height, weight, ice, space and depth without requiring a protagonist. Here the landscape is no longer empty. Something human-shaped waits for a celestial configuration that will unlock an older power. Nortfalke has described the Moonhunter as related to the Western werewolf tradition but less completely animal, a figure transformed by the strongest phase of the moon into a nocturnal predator. Nature and cosmos do not merely provide scenery. They activate what has been dormant within the body.

The six titles form a short incantation when read together. Approximately rendered, the planets take their positions; the subject enters the force field of the bull; the precise moment arrives; the winter moon rises; the sign is given; and the Moonhunter appears. The sequence lets the music behave like transformation occurring in stages rather than six unrelated atmospheric compositions. The opening pieces establish alignment and pressure. The second half supplies moonrise, recognition and pursuit. What begins in astronomy ends in flesh.

“As ús planeten yn posytsje stain” opens with the sensation of objects moving slowly into order. Warm synthesizer tones emerge against a darker floor, and repetition gives each return greater inevitability. The music does not illustrate planets through obvious science-fiction effects. It creates the more unsettling feeling that a vast arrangement is taking place beyond ordinary perception. The listener can hear the pattern but cannot influence it. Compared with the elemental stillness of Atmosfeer, these sequences contain more directional momentum, as though the landscape has begun revolving around an approaching event.

The seventeen-minute “Yn it krachtfjild fan de stiere” is the album’s gravitational center. Its extended cycles draw deeply from Berlin-school electronics, where a repeated sequencer pattern can become rhythm, road and measure of distance simultaneously. Nortfalke adds broad drones, plucked synthetic textures and faintly folk-like melodic figures, joining the cosmic motion of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze to the solitary atmosphere of 1990s black-metal-related keyboard music. The piece is long enough for recognition to become hypnosis. Once the basic pattern is understood, attention shifts toward tiny changes in register, density and perceived distance. The bull’s force field becomes audible not as a dramatic collision but as a pressure gradually reorganizing everything inside it.

“Op ’t krekte steut” compresses that long suspension into a short threshold. Its title suggests the exact or appointed moment, and the reduced duration gives it the function of a hinge. After the enormous second track, the music feels newly alert, as though a mechanism has finally clicked into position. The vinyl side ends here, physically separating preparation from manifestation. Turning the record would mean participating in the ritual: the planets and forces have aligned on one surface, while the moon and hunter wait on the other.

“Mooi wintermones opkomst” begins the second movement beneath the rising winter moon. The cover’s light now feels less peaceful than investigative. It illuminates the snow while deepening every shadow between the trunks. Nortfalke’s synthesizers remain warm and grainy even when describing cold, an apparent contradiction that gives the album much of its character. This is not sterile digital moonlight. It feels filtered through aged circuits, magnetic memory and imperfect machinery. The winter landscape glows because the electronics retain traces of human handling.

“It teken jeeuwn,” the giving of the sign, allows anticipation to become recognition. Repeated figures acquire a ceremonial quality without needing sampled chants, church bells or narrated instructions. Nortfalke trusts melody and duration to make the event legible. A signal has been received, although the music never declares whether it comes from the moon, the body or some buried inheritance awakened by both. This ambiguity protects the Moonhunter from becoming a simple fantasy-monster portrait. The transformation can also be heard psychologically, as the release of an archaic appetite normally restrained by ordinary social identity.

The title track completes the change without becoming an explosive finale. “Moonjeie” retains the album’s patient pacing, suggesting that the hunter’s power lies in concentration rather than frenzy. The music moves with the confidence of something now obeying its actual nature. Earlier tracks watched the sky and waited for permission; the closing piece inhabits the resulting condition. Its melodic repetition can feel predatory, not because it imitates footsteps, but because it repeatedly returns to the same territory with increasing certainty. The forest has not changed. The being moving through it has.

Garðarsson’s image gains another meaning in this context. The Moonhunter is absent from the visible scene, leaving the listener to occupy its position. The snow path curves away beneath the moon, but the deep shadows fall toward whoever is looking. Garðarsson later described this work as one of his most personally significant and mentally demanding pieces, created during a difficult period from which he eventually emerged. That private history does not convert the drawing into an illustration of recovery, but it adds another form of transformation beneath Nortfalke’s invented one. Artist and musician meet inside an image where darkness is not erased; it is worked through mark by mark until a path becomes visible.

Released in November 2021, Moonjeie stands at the point where Nortfalke’s dungeon-synth roots and Berlin-school ambitions become nearly inseparable. The record still carries the loneliness, regional language and handmade fantasy associated with dungeon synth, but its long sequencing and cosmic scale push beyond medieval rooms and ruined towers. It imagines northern folklore unfolding inside planetary machinery. The later compact-disc edition added more than thirty minutes through the three-part “Sniejeie” sequence, but the six-track core already forms a complete arc: alignment, gravitational capture, appointed moment, moonrise, signal and hunt.

The post preserves that arc with matching simplicity. One moonlit forest, one catalog number and one compact lossless archive are enough. The image does not reveal the creature, and the music does not describe it anatomically. Both understand that an unseen presence can become more convincing when the listener is given the conditions necessary to imagine it. By the closing track, the white path on the cover no longer seems empty. It looks freshly crossed.