The Woods Within

"The Woods Within" is music evoking an inner landscape. This is a place with both light and darkness, mostly hidden even from ourselves. Although it’s not a physical place you can think of it as a forest. To get there you must dare to travel alone into the unknown. Music is the vessel that moves us.

"The Woods Within" is the 1st single from Erik Dahl Ensemble’s new album which is thematically
examining sadness. The song expresses the mighty and mysterious that stirs inside us. It contains
few elements, a melody blowing in the wind, a rhytmical tapping, almost like a woodpecker, musical
lines interleaving like branches. Something grandiose appears for a moment and then dissolves
again, with only trembling leaves left behind.

The group with it’s home in Göteborg, Sweden, combines acoustic and electronic instruments to make music in a dreamland between genres.

Erik Dahl’s own words about how the song came about :

”The impulse to write the song 'The Woods Within' came from a suggestive electronic track. It moved me deeply. Listening to that was like opening a door, and I wanted to capture the same feeling with my mostly acoustic ensemble. All the dark instruments were utilized, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, viola, bowed double bass. I wrote a melody and then tried to strip away as much as possible until it felt like a forest enveloped in fog. An electronic element was needed, so in addition to the piano I play a noisy sampler patch. The sample is a recording of the magnetic fields from the trams outside my studio so those sounds are also an exploration of a hidden world. When the melody is finally heard in it’s entirety I drown it with an organ synth so that it has to struggle to be heard”.