Project On “The Land That Is Not”, Norwegian singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland builds upon the blueprint established with “Starflowers” with her quintet. The band is stronger now, the musicians having played concerts with Sinikka in the intervening years in diverse permutations and also strengthening their improvisational understanding with shared work in other contexts – Henriksen playing in Seim’s large ensemble, for instance, Seim and Ounaskari working together in Iro Haarla’s group, and so on, the circle of influence continuing to widen. And Anders Jormin, who has been Sinikka’s preferred bassist since the mid-1990s, also contributes as co-composer of two pieces here. For their new quintet recording, Sinikka takes as her inspirational starting point poetry of Edith Södergran (1892-1923) and Olav Håkonson Hauge (1908-1994). Södergran, Swedish-speaking poet in Raivola, near St Petersburg, counts now as one of the pioneers of modernist Swedish poetry, but in a brief life terminated by tuberculosis lived to see little recognition for her work. “The Land That is Not” (“Landet som icke är”) was amongst her last poems, and has been compared to Chuang-Tzu’s “Homeland of Nothing Whatsoever”, a work of spiritual detachment, claiming its distance from the chaos of human society. CD booklet for “The Land That Is Not” includes lyrics in Swedish and Norwegian with English translations.