Wolcensmen
Songs from the Fyrgen

If there is one thing that music can do, it is to reunite sensations, memories, and emotions: just a few notes, a few guitar arpeggios, and if the right strings are touched, in an instant, photographs, smells, noises, scenes lived, and momentarily set aside in some drawer of memory can resurface.
“Songs from the Fyrgen” is an ode to England, to its folklore, to its history of course, but as I experience it, based on the experiences I have lived and fortunately still live, it is above all a celebration of English Nature. “Heathen folk music,” three words that often recur when talking about Dan Capp and his creation Wolcensmen, and the definition is most fitting. If you want to make parallels, we can say that the British one-man band is initiating a revival process for “ancestral” or otherwise “pre-Christian” English folk music, similar to what Wardruna does for Norwegian music. I am of the opinion that to talk about music effectively, other senses and sensations need to be involved as well, and not being as familiar with the Scandinavian peninsula as I am with the land of Albion, I cannot delve too deeply. However, I can say this: “Songs from the Fyrgen” is a beautiful and ever-changing painting depicting the bucolic aspect of the English countryside, as changeable as its climate, capable of surprising you with its small joys and warming you with simple gestures.
I can see the misty moors where deer and cows graze undisturbed: the morning is cool, and the fog will soon give way to the dew that will settle on the ever-damp, verdant grass. Around you, that scent of wood, earth, moss-covered stones, the dry stone walls create paths that fade into the horizon; and suddenly the blanket of fog is pierced by sun rays, a sun only seemingly cold and distant, which, in reality, knows how to reach your heart and warm your chilled bones in a unique, entirely its own way.
In Wolcensmen's music, there is pride, humility, love for one's origins and past: with gentleness, he describes a harmonious yet open nature, a land full of contrasts, of seemingly pale colors, of flavors to be gradually discovered. The arpeggiated guitar, the winds, the percussion, even the occasional synths, everything is perfectly balanced and fundamental to achieving his project. If you are looking for musical references, they can be found in the earliest productions of Ulver, in the acoustic Winterfylleth (Capp is also a member of theirs, and it shows), in Empyrium.
An album made of small things, small gestures, small emotions and joys, just like the English nature that is the subject of the songs that compose it: one of the most beautiful surprises in the recent neofolk/pagan scene. Like a beautiful Romantic painting, “Songs from the Fyrgen” bypasses every word and every possible description and reaches directly to the heart, conquers and moves: it just needs to be listened to and savored with delicacy and tranquility.