Seidmen

Seidmen was founded by Thomas Holme and me during mid-winter 2010. Seid, or seiðr, is the name given to an old  form of sorcery or shamanism practiced in the far north. While female practitioners, known as vǫlva or seiðkona, are more widely attested,  there were definitely accounts of male practitioners as well. These were known as seiðmaðr - or  seidmen.

In practising magic the seidmen brought a social taboo, known as ergi, on to themselves, and were sometimes persecuted as a result. Because of its connection with ergi, seiðr was undoubtedly located on society's moral and psychological borders. Oðinn himself  is the primary deity associated with the craft.

Seidmen is a very personal project. We do not try to replicate or recreate the old traditions in any way, in music nor in content. Instead we try to connect with a  "primordial source of transgression", as it was dreamed by Thomas and me in 2010. Seidmen rarely makes live apperances or records.

Seidmen is about earth, ash, sacred plants and fire-woods,  ergi, nebulas and planetary magic.

No eyes and no sense.

"Grinding singsong, Seidmen is dancing on the edge of the table, discworld, rumbling over spines while someone is crawling under the surface, under the tapestry of socialization, where the wild things are and your neighbor is moaning in his dusty absurdity. Where the bone machine is roaring from spheres of the canal-ization, upside down, bottom up. On top: candles and masks, I put a spell on you, voodoo is in the air. When female voice is processed by man’s mouth, energy cut down, it’s raining nails, like teardrops, like filigree thoughts simultaneously falling apart – the decay of material is omniscient. Rainmaker, I can see the amphibian’s wooden backplate dawning, feedback, flash-back, we can’t stay here, this is bat country, however: loop (again and again).

An uneasy sense evolves – glimpsing through the shadow of your fingers, visions of the nightmare manifest in the unknown, waiting around the corner, there’s execration. The little shop of horrors opens when the cuckoo clock strikes and dolls corpses ask for the next dance. No eyes and no sense. Then cracking noise is overtaking, maroon mulhollandish, skirmish shivers, and somewhere a didgeridoo barks, desperately, and fails, fades into a monotone humming, final tone. A parasitic noise, heartbeats leading to the reconciliation of Latin-American guitars and tropic percussion, longing for escape exotic illusion absorbs docile, soul travellers or zombies, are we human or are we dancers?" - Franziska Mucha, concert review 2011

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