Mördarsviten, or “La Suite Meurtriere” is the first song Vox Vulgaris ever played together when they formed as teenagers in 1998. 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”. 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.

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. New tunes were learnt by ear both directly from other musicians and from recordings. 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. 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.”

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. 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.

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). On The Shape of Medieval Music to Come, only “Rokatanc” and “La Suite Meurtriere” represent the loud repertoire. Incidentally they are also the only two non-medieval melodies on the album.

“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. 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”. The arrangement is the same as it was in the beginning and they have always played it with the loudest instruments they could get their hands on. The first part is put together from two songs; “Le Maitre de Maison“, a traditional Alsatian branle with a very strong 16th century feel, together with the very similar sounding Elfdalian folk song called “Limu Limu Lima” which is often thought to originally be a Medieval hymn to the Virgin Mary. The third, slow part is probably Breton trad.

Rokatanc means “Fox dance” in Hungarian. It was learnt from some now long lost CD with Hungarian folk music and is a very simple theme similar in part to the "Bear Dance", a folk music theme known almost all over Europe. Some of the syncopations they picked up, some of them they added themselves. It’s only superficially similar to the famous Hungarian folk melody known as “Rokatanc” – did they hear another Rokatanc, or were they just very bad at learning songs? Too drunk to learn it proper and too stiff to sound like Hungarians? How many songs are not just musicians trying and failing to remember something they have heard anyway? The concepts of “composition” and “threshold of originality” fits folk music very badly.

Yet the history of copyright is oddly parallel to that of national romanticism. The first thing the 19th century composer giants did was to copyright arrangements of folk songs. “Rokatanc” i.e. is copyrighted by the Hungarian composer Leó Weiner. Is “Rokatanc” traditional Hungarian, Vox Vulgaris´s own composition, or just something that happens when you go diddely-doodely up and down a bagpipe? Often folk music is just born out of the instrument and its limitations and if you strip away all the syncopations and arrangements Rokatanc is mostly just what happens when you do some QWERTY and a little bit of ASDFGH on a bagpipe.

The Branle comes from Arbeaus Dancing manual (1589) where he calls it a “Branle Simple”.

"Spanish Bombs" comes from some CD with traditional Galician Gaita-music, chosen as it was the only track to feature a minor scale. The name was lost in translation and a new one was ripped from The Clash's song about the Spanish Civil War.

"Music for the Children of Gothenburg" was recorded on one of the last appearances Vox Vulgaris did before their long hiatus, two school concerts on Musikens Hus in Gothenburg in 2004.

Vox Vulgaris are happy and flattered to see that their songs have entered the traditional repertoire of Neo-Medieval music with dozens of covers on the Internet, often playing all of the arrangements down to every note of the improvised solos. Vox Vulgaris were lucky to be in the first generation after the Middle Ages that was able to learn medieval music as an already revived tradition, and they are now very happy to see that the music they learnt and played has a life of its own and that Medieval Music is yet again a living tradition spanning several generations of musicians learning from each other.