Benedicte Maurseth is not simply playing the Hardanger fiddle anymore; she is bending it into a compass, a listening device, an ecological stethoscope pressed to the chest of the Hardangervidda plateau. Mirra, her follow-up to the award-winning Hárr, circles around the lives of wild reindeer, creatures she has seen only twice in her life yet has carried with her since childhood. It is less an ethnographic study and more a myth told in sound: the grunt of hooves on ice, the whisper of snow, the stubborn silence of waiting out a storm at minus forty. Maurseth, with Håkon Stene, Mats Eilertsen, and Morten Qvenild, arranges these tales into a patient music where repetition becomes survival, drone becomes migration, and minimalism becomes the animal wisdom of not wasting energy.

The tracks follow the annual cycle - calves staggering to their feet, summer grazing, the inevitable hunt - while also stretching into metaphors for human endurance and fragility. “Jaktmarsj” is not a triumphant anthem but a reminder that danger is just another season; “Simleflokk under månen” lets a herd shimmer into moonlight, hypnotic and spectral, as if the listener were both predator and prey. The title itself, “mirra”, speaks of reindeer running in circles: a practical survival trick but also a metaphor for our own looping lives, our attempts to fend off predators both ecological and political.

It would be easy to call this “folk meets minimalism”, or to cite krautrock and American pattern music as influences, but that misses the point. Maurseth is not layering traditions like a clever producer; she is re-tuning the listener’s body until we too feel like herd animals, negotiating a shrinking habitat. The reindeer grunt and click in her music without words, yet their message is clearer than lyrics: we are still here, for now.

And there lies the irony. Maurseth gives us music that is beautiful, almost comforting in its cycles, while reminding us that the very subject - wild reindeer - is vanishing under human pressure. The listener is seduced into the circle, but the circle itself may be breaking. Mirra is therefore both celebration and requiem, a record that teaches endurance while quietly asking whether endurance will be enough.