The Beginning
In 2022, Smertekirken was privileged to facilitate Tim Nancarrow’s Rites of Ash and Oak: A Ritual Suspension Sacrifice to Odin at Midgardsblot. Our brief experience on that opening day of the festival made a huge impression on us. Everyone who we met: participants, volunteers, organizers, technicians, and everyone else was happy and nice. Even the people working their butts off were super nice!
Tim’s ritual was intense and the energy in Gildehallen—a replica of a viking longhouse—was massive! We were there, primarily, to ensure that Tim's 2-point chest suspension was done right, but the experience opened our eyes. Over beers and mead later that evening, Tim said that he thought he would not be able to return to Midgardsblot the next year. On our drive back to the farm afterward, We started talking about the kind of ritual that Smertekirken might perform at Midgardsblot and we immediately thought of our dear friends Vanessa and Morten; we just knew that, if we had them onboard, we could do something massive!
Composing A Ritual for Midgardsblot
When we were asked to come back to Midgardsblot and perform a ritual on all four days, we were awestruck! We were also certain that we could not do it without The Maniac and Visobel Black. When we asked, they immediately said yes to doing this project together.
We had been thinking and talking about making a musical instrument that incorporates a body suspended from hooks since 2013 but, amazingly, the first idea that Morten and Vanessa approached us with, was using a string suspended from a body as a functional part of a musical instrument. We immediately started working on the idea with no doubt that this was what we wanted to do.
After that, things developed in the most amazingly collaborative way. Each one of us contributed to the development of the ritual in a way that was so thoughtful and positive that it was an absolute pleasure. Our ideas resonated at a level that made creating the ritual a very organic process. We explored the question of what we wanted our intention for a ritual for Midgardsblot to be and, quickly, we landed on Resonance.
Photos by Morten, Alan, and June
Making A New Instrument and Refining the Ritual
We assembled the instrument and developed the meaning and progression of the ritual contemporaneously; Morten and Vanessa in Lier and us at the farm. We also had a few work weekends at the farm, which allowed us to firm up concepts, work on the instrument, and hone our intent.
While on the farm, Vanessa was capturing sounds and feelings around the property to inform aural aspects of her composition. In the end, the instrument comprised Vanessa’s waterfone, a locomotive bell that belonged to Alan’s grandfather, a rock from our farm, and a stirrup from a saddle that Alan was given when he was a boy—said to have belonged to a gun fighter in Oklahoma during the 1860s. We worked through many different options before landing on the exact cable that would connect the instrument to the suspended body. Once assembled, every disparate object comprising the finished instrument blended perfectly into the whole. It truly became an object that was more than the sum of its parts. Each added piece and each small improvement made the instrument more resonant.
Photos from Friday—backstage and ritual—taken by Helene Fjell
We wanted to find a way to bring the people who would come to the ritual into closer contact with what was happening on stage, and Vanessa suggested that we gather stones from the property and mark them somehow. These stones would be given to members of the audience at the beginning of the ritual, placed at the front of the stage while we performed the ritual, and given back to the audience members who held them at the end for them to keep. The stones were gathered at our farm, and we held and considered each of them before picking the stones that we would use—from them, we each chose a stone to have with us while we continued our work. We dared to hope that everyone who came to see us, whether they received a stone or not, would allow themselves to connect with, and add their own energy to, the ritual.
As we delved into the work, we incorporated our feelings, challenges, and emotions—forming them into an intention that we could all embrace, explore, and enact. Wonder, joy, grief, sadness, doubt, certainty, anger, fear, and a host of other feelings mixed and coalesced as in a crucible. These feelings placed together in the context of our ritual, again, formed a resonance.
Five days before we left for Borre, Morten and Vanessa came back out to the farm for a final technical check, and to get our heads further into the ritual that we would soon perform. Vanessa’s composition sounded fantastic and fit exactly. The stones had been carved with the Algiz and Eihwaz runes, and the symbol for the Earth element, and had soaked up the energy from the previous full moon. All of us had an aura of joy, excitement, and that special feeling of anticipation mixed with nerves that can come before a big event. Late on Sunday night, after a rehearsal with everything but hooks, it felt like we were ready.
