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About us...

Marianne Holmboe  
Marianne was born in Oslo, Norway. Her musical career started at an early age, singing in the Radio Choir, and it wasn't long before she started to play guitar and piano and write her own songs. In 1989 Marianne took up oriental dance and became interested in the music. This in turn led to a fascination with oriental song,  and resulted in her singing in the music groups Sumer and Cabaret Oriental.  

Marianne's musical adventure has taken her in a wealth of different directions, the common factor being folk or ethnic roots - music from the Romany culture, African music, Balkan, Latin-American, folk-rock, reggae...all is grist to her mill.
Besides singing herself, and acting as choir-leader and arranger, Marianne continues to write songs which she performs herself in the singer-songwriter tradition, and has released a CD with her songs , "Med munnen full av jord" ("With a mouth full of earth")
She has been in Spain, studying flamenco song.


Josefine Liftig
 
Josefine was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and as a young child became fascinated by the tonality of Medieval, Oriental and Swedish folk-music.  Her interest in these musical genres has flourished through their active practice  and through her  competance on wide variety of instruments.  She has a broad and multifacetted musical background, illustrated by the many spheres in which she has worked - as flautist, pianist, conductor and arranger.  Josefine has also done a lot of dancing, and , in fact, met Marianne when they were both learning oriental dance!

It was while studying Spanish at university that Josefine learned about the Sephardic  inheritance and, to make a long story short, all the bits of the jigsaw puzzle fell finally  into place –  at last the exciting cultural and tonal links between the genres above was made clear and invited her to draw together the threads...

 

Adele Veronika Halten
 
As of the autumn of 2008, Adele Veronika Halten is our new harpist.
She is classically trained, educated at
the Swedish National Orchestra Academy (SNOA),
the Music Conservatory of Norway, the Music Conservatory of Falun,
the Music Conservatory of Paris and Kulturskolan in Trondheim from the age of 12.
Veronika's experience as a professional harpist started in the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra with conductor Ole Kristian Ruud when she was 14 years of age. Since then, she has played both with other symphony orchestras and in smaller ensembles with a repertory of music ranging from medieval to contemporary, from folk music to experimental newly composed music, in addition to the classical repertory.
Besides playing her harp, Veronika's skills include dancing, singing and playing percussion!
Read more about Veronika on her own homepage: www.harpediemproductions.com
Sally Sehlin  
Sally, our alternating harpist, was born in Falkirk, in the lowlands of Scotland. Sally abandoned classical guitar for folk music in the sixties, but did not forget her passion for early music. In the years that followed she learned to play a variety of fretted and wind instruments, singing to her own accompaniment at local folk song clubs. Other sources of inspiration were Gilbert and Sullivan and choral music.  Moving to Sweden via Tanzania in the late seventies, she enjoyed exploring the Swedish folk-music tradition, and soon became involved in a variety of different choirs and music groups, both as a member and as musical leader and arranger. 
A lifelong passion is dance - especially Renaissance dance, African dance and disco!
  

Sally loves to cross musical barriers, to experiment, to mix and match between different epochs and genres. This could partially explain why she took up playing the folk harp in 1997 - well, you're never too old - but does not explain why she also started building harps – it must just be that insatiable drive to learn new skills!

Sally now lives in a house in the country with her harps, other instruments and a variety of animals, including a potbellied pig