Scratch the surface of present-day Denmark and you’ll find a landscape rich in pre-Christian relics. While a good number of the country’s burial mounds, dolmens and Viking forts lie quietly and half-forgotten among farmland, villages and windswept islands, they find a new voice in The Voyager, Clarissa Connelly’s album of songs composed after visiting many of the ancient sites.

Originally from Fife, Scotland, Connelly moved to Denmark with her Danish mother in 2001 and went on to study composition in Copenhagen. The Voyager follows two previously released cassettes on the Brystet label, 2015’s Come In Roses and 2018’s Tech Duinn.

With a sound infused with the stark harmonies of Danish traditional song, the intricate chordal twists of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming and the progressive folk of acts such as Clannad, the album’s complex arrangements of multitracked vocals and manipulated guitars, piano and flute braid with the distinctively 1980s presets of her Korg M1 synthesizer. Guests joining her on the record include members of neo-shoegaze group Collider and string quartet Halvcirkel.

The Voyager comes with the companion app Vandringen which maps hundreds of historic sites while pairing some of them with Connelly’s songs and new works by a range of musicians and artists.

Abi Bliss: The Voyager inhabits a distinctive soundworld at the intersection of several genres. What music was formative for you?

Clarissa Connelly: There’s a lot of different stuff, but mainly growing up with Enya and Madonna: Ray Of Light is a really huge influence. I also listened to Mike Oldfield a lot, especially Incantations. The melodies on that album seem eternal; they never end but just pick up from the beginning again.

Although I also listen to a lot of new music, the core of my creative expression comes from these experiences growing up, having my Discman walking around and dancing by myself. I used to walk in the hills in Scotland, so moving to Denmark was huge at that time in my life as the countryside is mostly very flat. Right now I’m on an island called Fanø, which is beautiful and there are lots of hills. So I really love that because it reminds me of being a child.

One thing about walking around listening to music alone is that it really influences your perception of the environment – it’s a cliche to say that it becomes the soundtrack of your own film, but did you experience that?

Yes, exactly. And there was also that time before the iPod came along when you listened more to a whole album than people tend to do today. I’ve lived in Copenhagen for some time now and being alone in the countryside is different, because in the city you’re always being watched. Even if you take the train some kilometres out of the city there’s always people around. But having a feeling of solitude definitely created a freedom in my singing and writing that I think I only have because I could walk and dance and sing alone without anyone watching me, out in the woods.

How did the concept for The Voyager originate?

In the summer of 2018 I walked a route called Hærvejen; it takes two weeks to walk from the top of Jutland all the way down to Germany. Looking at all of the places around me, I started writing little melodies, like sketches in memos on my phone. I became interested in site-specific works and having some boundaries before writing a song; not just sitting down and improvising. Some of the songs on The Voyager seem far away from the sites; maybe from the outside it’s hard to find the link, but it’s the stories these sites have told me on my travels.

It started by only being the places on the walking track, but then I began to create the app at the same time, because there’s all this information that I didn’t have for these places and it took too long to Google if a particular hill was a burial mound or just a hill and I wanted to know. So I contacted the Danish government and asked for permission to gather up all this information from their website that doesn’t make any sense. They gave me a huge PDF with all of the sites. I became more and more interested in other places that weren’t only on Hærvejen, such as the place where I wrote and filmed the music video for “Holler” and where I wrote “The Hills Are Crying”. I read about these places and felt that I had to go there, and then I went there and wrote more songs.

How strong a connection to the past did you feel when you visited the sites? Were they generally easy to find or hidden under farmland?

Many of the places are forgotten to some extent, at least when I was there back in 2018. Since the pandemic, people’s interests have turned back to what’s around them in a really beautiful way. But I’ve always been interested in how the landscape was formed, either by humans or by the ice age pushing the soil back and forth creating mountains, or ice holes that become a lake two ice ages later. Imagining that timespan gives me a huge feeling of wanting to create.

I’m fascinated by old buildings in cities – like a church, looking at the stones and wondering who built it – but they’re only maybe a thousand years old. Looking at these more ancient sites, the burial mounds and Viking fortresses, that’s even further back into history. I just get awestruck and want to sing or write about it.

Nowadays a lot of ancient sites have nearly blended into the natural landscape, but when they were built they were at the cutting edge of the people’s technology and knowledge.

Yes, it was all very technological and scientific. But ‘science’ and ‘religion’ is maybe a modern separation. And the woods have been planted by humans… old woods are difficult to find in Denmark.

How did the concept of Scandinavian vitalism influence the album?

I’ve been reading a lot of work by a Finnish-Swedish poet from the 1920s called Edith Södergran. I’m not an academic in vitalism, but in her writings there’s a force in life and in nature that can’t help but live, move on and evolve. It doesn’t have to be religious; it could also be scientific. I believe that no matter what happens with the world and the slippery slope we’re on right now ruining everything, a beauty will emerge from that. Maybe not with humans but there’s a life force.

How did you document your reactions to each site when visiting?

Mostly it was melodies, just an impression of the place. When I write music, the melodies often come when I’m outside walking and then I record them as phone memos. Then when I was having a break, eating lunch, I’d write little stories to describe the surroundings that I could look at when I sat at my computer to compose.

And after that, how did these fragments become songs?

I often like to write the harmonic base of the song separately from the melody. Then I listened through the memos from specific sites and found the right melody for the chords and mashed them together until they made sense! I do that often and it’s fun, really forcing material together until it works.

Who are the narrators in your lyrics: imagined or real people, or the places themselves?

On “The Hills Are Crying” it’s the hills that are crying out for a saviour. It’s apocalyptic in a way because we’re destroying all this beauty in the world. I think many of the songs have that sorrow to them. Mostly the lyrics are written from the perspective of a grief at not being able to look at the landscape as it was.

Given its theme, The Voyager doesn’t sound timeless in the sense that some composers might interpret the idea. With its mix of acoustic instruments and synthesized sounds, you’re certainly avoiding the pitfall of trying to evoke the past by reaching for a lute. What choices shaped the musical palette of the album?

Kate Bush has been a huge influence. She’s brilliant at making compositions that sound as though they could both be very ancient and right now. Also the same with Enya and Mike Oldfield and the melodies on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. I like how the mixture of components I used on The Voyager – flutes and strings and guitars that sound pretty 1990s – doesn’t sound like something that was written in 2020. I don’t want it to sound like now, nor the 1970s, nor the 90s. I wanted the sounds I’ve chosen to sound as though they could be played at any time in history.

I also like blending instruments, layering the strings or flutes so they don’t sound exactly like what they are. But the fun thing is creating sounds that are familiar yet also very unfamiliar at the same time. They’re balancing in a place where it could be a violin, or a guitar, or a piano.

Our experience of visiting ancient sites is a present day mix of what’s old with restorations, additions and interpretations. There are ongoing arguments about how to present them authentically when you can never directly access how they were. Is the mixing of acoustic and digital sounds on The Voyager a parallel for this, or is that a metaphor too far?

You can never recreate something that was there once. Of course, I have a romantic idea of being at these sites, and the way I dress has something to with the music as it’s a mixture. But that’s what I mean about the sounds that you can’t place. The interesting place is the in-between. It’s not a modernisation of these sites, building something new on top. Instead it’s something very old and something very new meeting in a place that is unrecognisable. I want to have the perspective in my life of knowing that existence isn’t just now. Because I think we make wrong decisions, not having that perspective.

I’m currently reading Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, which is set in the future but creates an anthropology of a people called the Kesh, who live in Northern California long after an apocalyptic event in our future. The Kesh don’t understand time as a linear progression but as enmeshed within space and ritual. Are there elements of that in The Voyager?

Yes, that’s also in having the melodies as something circular and repetitive, where melodies loop, not as in having something loop in Ableton, but a larger loop. I feel the same way about living in the city, where you can only see the buildings on the other side of the street and maybe at the end of the road. Something happens to your sight if you don’t have anything far away to focus upon. There are many ways to have a perspective upon time, but these sites bring that perspective very directly.

Vandringen isn’t just a location-finding app but a source of inspiration for 20 musicians and artists who you invited to create new works that will appear when users visit the sites. Could you explain more?

The artists are totally free to create what they want: write a poem or paint a picture of the area or compose something. They just have to go to the site and be there. Some of the pieces are very directly written; with others you maybe can’t find the link straight away. Lots of the artworks will only pop up on the app when you’re within 500 metres of the site. If you’re walking nearby it’s meant to inspire you to go there. I chose the first 20 artists and I want to give them the opportunity to choose the next artists themselves, so the project keeps going. I may be the curator but I want to let go of that role.

I also wrote a soundtrack called Guild over these last couple of months for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. The exhibition is called GAMES and is about fantasy. Guild is a 40 minute piece that’s a soundtrack for playing Magic: The Gathering cards. That’s also site-specific in a way for the Magic world. I think it links well with The Voyager, as although the album is about our world, it’s still being looped into something that has its own space in some kind of way.

If we were speaking a thousand years in the future, what kind of album might you make about the remains of now?

It would probably sound a lot darker. I always think about the underground rail tunnels; they’re going to stay there forever. So maybe in a thousand years looking back it will seem like we all lived underground, because there will still be all these railways.

Clarissa Connelly’s The Voyager is released by C&C Music and is reviewed in The Wire 444. A vinyl version is released on 2 April.