Stokke Strum from Genklang by Cirklen

Stokke Strum is the second single taken from Cirklen's debut album Genklang (Danish for resonance), which will be out May 27. Genklang is a collaboration between Cirklen and the Danish choir ensemble MidtVest Pigekor, composed for the unusual constellation of six acoustic guitars and classical choir. In January the sextet released their first single, "Falls Rolls", which received airplay on Danish national radio. Read more about Genklang here.

On a foundation of powerful guitar strokes, medieval tonality, and bass lines played with sticks (stokke in Danish) “Stokke Strum” engages in a dialogue with the church architecture in which it was recorded. Choir voices and guitar melodies intertwine and rush towards the listener from every corner of the church room – they interact, struggle and merge into an almost unnervingly ecstatic whole. There's a fragility built into the intensity and tempo of the song, a sense that something is about to break, and the distance between harmony and dissonance is quite short. The melodies slide seamlessly between these two extremes, only to be end up dislocated and unresolved. Because rather than moving from tension towards resolution, Stokke Strum moves from the clarified into the unresolved, from answer to question mark. A curious echo in the traditional architecture of the church.

Since 2009 the Danish guitar sextet Cirklen, lead by Niels Bjerg and Anders Holst, has explored music in relation to spatial experience. They started as an all electric guitar clubbing-experience surrounding the audience with huge amps, but have since gone to produce acoustic music as well.