He never gave it a name, Vox Vulgaris called it “Mördarsviten”, meaning “The Killer Suite' but for some reason the name was later given in French on “The Shape of Medieval Music to Come”. “La Suite Meurtriere” is three melodies put together in a suite by late Harald Pettersson, legendary drone music pioneer and musician – father of Vox Vulgaris´s cofounder Magne Pettersson. Incidentally they are also the only two non-medieval melodies on the album. On The Shape of Medieval Music to Come, only “Rokatanc” and “La Suite Meurtriere” represent the loud repertoire. There are few recordings of Vox Vulgaris loud repertoire, partly due to the ambulatory and unruly nature of the setup (Imagine a rock band with no cables attached, suddenly to “go off stage” does not mean to “stop playing” anymore). They did not know it at the time but people In the Middle Ages had faced the same problems and had classified their instruments as either “haut” (loud) or “bas” (soft) and had rarely mixed the two types. They quickly realized they needed louder instruments to be heard over revellers or over distances but learnt that the shawms and bagpipes needed were painful to hear in a church or ruin so soon they had two sets of instruments with two separate repertoires - one loud and standing up with bagpipes and drums, and one quiet, sitting down with strings and recorders. The ethos of Vox Vulgaris could be summed up as “Musicians have always had fun and they have always improvised, if you are not having fun and you are not improvising - then it is not authentic.” Vox Vulgaris's approach was always that of a folk band, both in this and in that they always treated medieval music as folk music just as they believe medieval musicians had done. New tunes were learnt by ear both directly from other musicians and from recordings. The six or so coming years Vox Vulgaris toured extensively, playing both for sitting audiences in churches, ruins, concert halls and on meadows as well as for dancing, partying and even rioting audiences on streets, in musty cellars and other venues. A first gig was made at punk venue Kafé 44 and a now sadly lost demo tape gave them their first concert at Medeltidsveckan in Visby 1999. Fittingly, the story of Vox Vulgaris had started already a couple of years earlier with another crime, although the two soon to be bandmates befriending each other in the exercise yard of a Stockholm jail - both being several years too young to legally be locked up - would probably have called it “the opposite of murder”. Mördarsviten, or “La Suite Meurtriere” is the first song Vox Vulgaris ever played together when they formed as teenagers in 1998.

Vox spain to spain vocalist