Red Cottages by a Frozen Lake | Swedish Nyckelharpa Music for Deep Sleep | World Music

Evening in Dalarna, in the middle of Sweden, at the end of a winter day. The lake is frozen right across and covered in snow, with one line of footprints going over it. On the far shore stand a handful of old timber cottages, dark red with white window frames, snow thick on their roofs and lamplight already in the windows. Spruce forest rises black behind them. The sky is deep blue with one last band of cold rose along the horizon. Outside the nearest door, somebody is playing a nyckelharpa. Did you know? That red on the walls is falu red, and it started as a by-product of a copper mine in this very province. The pigment comes out of the waste rock, and it was painted onto timber houses from the seventeenth century onwards - not only for the colour, but because the paint lets the wood breathe instead of sealing it, so the timber lasts. A whole countryside ended up one shade because of what a mine happened to leave behind. The instrument has a strange mechanism. A nyckelharpa is a fiddle with keys: a row of small wooden keys runs along the neck, and pressing one pushes a little tangent against the string to set the note, so it is bowed like a fiddle but fingered like a keyboard. Underneath there are extra strings that nobody touches at all - they simply ring in sympathy, which is where that halo of sound comes from. It appears in a Swedish church carving from the fourteenth century, almost died out in the early twentieth, and was brought back. One more thing about the lake out there. It sits inside a ring left by a meteorite that struck roughly 377 million years ago - one of the largest impact structures in Europe. The shape of the water is the shape of the crater. Best for: Sleep & deep rest Winding down at the end of the day Quiet reading Long winter evenings 0:00 I. Blue Hour on the Ice 6:12 II. Red Walls in the Snow 14:10 III. Paint From a Copper Mine 20:08 IV. Wood That Still Breathes 25:36 V. Keys Against the Strings 30:34 VI. Strings That Answer Alone 37:11 VII. A Ring Left by a Meteorite 45:09 VIII. Lamplight in the Window 51:10 IX. Snow on the Spruce 56:13 X. Until the Morning Light --- About this channel: Wander & Wonder Music travels the world through music. Each video is a stop on a journey — a real, beautiful place on Earth, painted in warm cinematic art and scored with original music played on the instruments of that land. All music and artwork are original creations, made with the help of AI and crafted with care in Japan. #sweden #dalarna #nyckelharpa #nordicmusic #winter #folkmusic #sleepmusic #relaxingmusic #ambient