WARDRUNA
ROYAL ALBERT HALL, LONDON
Norway’s folk visionaries bring the sacred to South Kensington
JO QUAIL
Wardruna reawaken the age of the mystics
JO QUAIL IS in her element. “I’ve cried twice today already,” she tells the crowd already amassed in this history-steeped amphitheatre. If the venue is a fitting landmark for a cellist who fuses the deeply intimate with ornate sonic grandeur, the circumstances couldn’t be more apt too. As with the headliners, her performances give the sense of time being a unifying, all-permeating force. There’s something innately organic in the way the opening Rex Infractus builds up from tentative bass tones to rich, multi-layered yet still-nascent wonder, like watching a time-lapse of a field emerging into bloom. Adder Stone, “for all the witches in the room”, is woven around dramatic percussive loops, as the sawing strings suggest pagan dances and reawakened folk memory, hitting nerves at their most resonant pitch.