There’s a moment in "Norwegian Electronic Folk Music" when the munnharpe twangs like a techno bassline and the 909 kicks answer it, as if the two had been secret pen pals for centuries. That’s the kind of sly historical revisionism Kenneth Lien and Center of the Universe excel at: not rewriting tradition, but inserting a USB cable into it.

Lien, the folk purist with a black-metal past, and Jørgen Skjulstad (alias Center of the Universe), the eternal cosmic prankster of the Oslo underground, approach Norwegian heritage like kids discovering an ancient instrument that - surprise! - has a MIDI port. Their partnership is not ironic, though irony hovers at the edges like fog on a fjord. It’s affectionate mischief, a dance between bones and wires, past and bass.

The record plays out like a rave in a barn that’s somehow also a stave church. “Fanitullen” opens with the devil fiddling at 120 BPM, “Røysekatten” is a sly creature that could sneak onto a John Talabot setlist, and “Pillarguri” sounds like folk ghosts learning to two-step to acid house. The munnharpe and hardanger fiddle converse fluently with the TB-303 and the Roland 909, and their dialogue never feels forced-more like a reunion after a very long misunderstanding.

The genius of the album is that it doesn’t fetishize either tradition or technology. Instead, it treats both as living vocabularies. The springar becomes syncopated IDM, the gangar turns cosmic, and in “Håvards Sorg”-the most touching track here-melancholy stretches out across a shimmering electronic plain. Lien’s folk phrasing carries centuries of dance and grief, but the production gives it wings.

And yes, it’s fun - more fun than its concept should logically allow. Lien and Skjulstad make you believe that halling dancers might someday stomp in time to breakbeats under strobes, that electro-halling could be a real genre, and that maybe, just maybe, Norwegian folklore was always waiting for someone to plug it in.

If "Snu hver stein" felt like the duo were excavating something ancient, "Norwegian Electronic Folk Music" is them resurrecting it - alive, glowing, and just slightly tipsy on voltage. A love letter written in both runes and binary.