WARDRUNA Confirmed For Holland's INCUBATE Festival

WARDRUNA — the folk project featuring former GORGOROTH drummer Einar "Kvitrafn" Selvik (who has also played with SIGFADER, JOTUNSPOR and DEAD TO THIS WORLD) and GOD SEED/ex-GORGOROTH frontman Gaahl (real name: Kristian Espedal) — has been confirmed for this year's Incubate festival, set to take place September 13-20 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. WARDRUNA will perform on Saturday, September 19 at a special place: outside the city, next to an inn named after the malicious Buckriders horde. This very unique performance will be open to everyone with a ZXZW 2009 day ticket for Saturday and, of course, all Incubate 2009 passepartouts.

In addition to WARDRUNA, Incubate will feature performances by more than 200 artists, including ALTAR OF PLAGUES, ALTAAR and MANATEES.

For more information, visit www.incubate.org.

During this year's edition of the Inferno Music Conference, WARDRUNA performed live in front of the Oseberg ship in the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo, Norway. The concert took place on April 9 and Gaahl joined Kvitrafn for the performance, which can be viewed below.

"Runaljod - Gap Var Ginnunga", the debut album from WARDRUNA, was released on January 19 via Indie Recordings.

The idea of WARDRUNA began to take shape in 2002 as a project where founder and main man Einar Kvitrafn Selvik could work with a musical expression and instrumentation very different from what his involvements in various metal bands would allow. Naturally, it also became a place where his passion for and practice of Norse paganism and runes could be combined with music.

In the spring of 2007, the project started to attract attention after it was featured on the soundtrack of the much publicized "True Norwegian Black Metal" documentary about Gaahl (TRELLDOM, GORGOROTH, etc.) by Peter Beste and Vice Films.

Nearly six years in the making, WARDRUNA's long-awaited debut album is the first part of the planned "Runaljod" trilogy which will musically interpret the runes of the elder futhark. This highly visual music is hard to place into any specific genre, and there isn't really much to compare it to. The style can perhaps be described as a curious blend of folk, world and ambient music, but without being limited by the sometimes restricted scope of these genres.

"Runaljod - Gap Var Ginnunga" has a very profound and unique sound that consists of a wide array of instruments, some of which are rarely used. A few examples: deer hide frame drums, mouth harp, goat horns, lur, Hardanger fiddle and tagelharpe ("viking fiddle"). Sounds of more unorthodox ‘instruments’ like trees, stones and fire are also incorporated into the music, and it's all topped off with powerful vocal performances from no less than three vocalists.

The album was produced and engineered by Kvitrafn himself in his own Fimbulljóð studio. Many of the recording sessions were executed outdoors at carefully selected locations with instruments or natural sounds that are relevant to the different runes.