One of the magic tricks of Jon Balke‘s „Hafla“ is the handling of time. I mean, come on, poems, thousand years old, and translated in modern day English, they sound like simple gestures from everyday life, open for a look to the stars, daydreaming included. Simple as that. These songs all have the length of singles, and, like following an unwritten rule, Jon Balke and his collaborators just ignore any kind of ornamentation or excursion. By just sticking to a song‘s essence, they achieve a beautiful paradox: each track is packed with ideas, nevertheless transparent in every second. How can something overflowing and passionate be so up to the point, so crystalline, so calm? Longing and loss in equal measure, and lyrics from eternities ago that could easily have been written, in certain moods by, well, Leonard Cohen or Robert Burns.