Featured Tune: "Halling etter Olaf Frøyså" from Ånon Egeland

Dancing Strings in Metal: A Halling Reimagined

Ånon Egeland’s “Halling etter Olaf Frøyså” is more than a preservation of tradition—it’s a reawakening. With this track, drawn from the legacy of Olaf Frøyså’s collected hallings, Egeland takes a piece originally bound by fiddle transcription and breathes new life into it through the jew’s harp. The result is a performance that feels at once primal and precise, a meeting of raw metallic resonance and centuries-old melodic memory.

What strikes first is the vitality in the rhythm. The jew’s harp, often underestimated in its expressive range, becomes a vessel of both subtlety and power here. Egeland doesn’t simply translate the halling into another instrument’s tongue; he distills its essence, reshaping motifs that would have sprawled across the fiddle’s compass into tight, ringing phrases full of earthy energy. The upper-register harmonics he explores—delicate, otherworldly—give the piece a shimmering edge, like hearing echoes across a valley.

There’s a sense of intimacy in this interpretation, as if we’re hearing not just music but memory itself—half a century of personal encounters, mentorships, and inherited repertoire condensed into a few vibrating strings of metal. And yet, the track never feels like a relic. Instead, it pulses with immediacy, a reminder that tradition is not static but alive, bending and resonating with each new hand that holds it.