Lena Willemark & Ale Möller Nordan

About the Performance

The multi-award-winning duo Ale Möller and Lena Willemark have released the album “Nordankväden”, where they have hand-picked some of the country’s most exciting folk and jazz musicians – from both older and younger generations. Violins and fiddles, hammered dulcimers and shell mallets. Kohorn, kulning and live electronics. The result is a world that moves between tradition and new writing, acoustic and electronic – with high intensity and extra everything. Sunday, May 24, we see them at UKK in a powerful and generous concert.

Ale and Lena found each other as playing companions in the mid-1980s: in their love of the older folk music, but also in their desire to seek new paths for it. Over the years they have played together in a number of contexts where they have created music based on – but never limited by – the Swedish folk tradition, in groups such as Frifot, Jul i Folkton and Enteli. Together and individually, they have been awarded countless prestigious prizes and awards for the way they have developed and renewed Nordic folk music for decades – royal medals, the government’s honorary export prize, the Folk Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award, the City of Stockholm’s honorary prize and a place in the Swedish Music Hall of Fame, to name a few. There is no doubt that they are two of the most distinctive and significant voices on the Swedish folk music scene.

With Nordan, they take on the medieval ballads – a fascinating branch of folk tradition where both music and lyrics have many roots. The stories have resonance in our own time, reminding us that people in all ages have shared the same emotions: love, sorrow, joy, loyalty and spirituality. At the same time, the way we approach life’s big questions has changed – not least our relationship to the magical and mystical. With Nordankväden, we step into a fairytale world that contains both the grand and the small: modes and melodies hundreds of years old, in long suites where an acoustic sound world meets electronic expressions – while retaining the depth and presence of the older folk music.

The Nordan project was born 30 years ago, when the iconic album Nordan was released in 1994 on the initiative of the ECM record label. The album was a huge success with over 60,000 copies sold, Grammis and several sold-out concert tours – and opened the Swedish song treasure to an international audience.

Nordankväden is both a new start and an extension of the same theme, now in collaboration with producer Hampus Norén (Sara Parkman, Shida Shahabi, Teodor Wolgers) and the record label collective Supertraditional, who – like Möller and Willemark – have established themselves as exciting innovators in their experimentation with what traditional music is and can be.

Participants

Ale Möller – mandola, flutes, hammered dulcimer, shellmaja, cow horn, vocals
Lena Willemark – vocals, violin, viola
Hampus Norén – live electronics, organ, vocals
Dan Berglund – double bass
Anna Möller – violin, viola d’amore, vocals
Tina Quartey – percussion

Date and time: May 24, 2026, 19:30 – 21:00