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Written in Folk Roots issue 146/147, 1995

MARI BOINE &...
Leahkastin/Unfolding
Verve World 523889-2 (1994)

It’s a characteristic of a great artist to find the interesting wrinkles in an apparently featureless plain, and work away at them with such fierce intensity that they become landmarks. When Mari Boine hits the spotlight and her band strikes up with its big, wide, sparse sounds, an audience is drawn into her world.
      As so often, no CD can touch the live show; we can’t hear the mesmerising way she moves and radiates, but we can hear that total focus in her voice and the way in which she and the band make a new tradition by drawing on the instruments of others but avoiding overt musical references as they construct their own framework. The only long-established Sami traditional instruments are voice and drum, but Boine’s band (the “&...” of the title) has, as well as Helge Norbakken’s sensitive exploration of the light and shade of deep drums and other percussion, guitarist Roger Ludvigsen, Carlos Quispe’s quena and other South American flutes, Gjermund Silset’s bass, and Hege Rimestad’s violin.
      All these instruments have strong cultural connections, but they’re used in such a way as to keep the ambience definitely Samiland. That’s probably particularly difficult with violin, an instrument which tends to stand out among the deep-toned surroundings, and whose very technique is more conditioned than most by the traditions in which it has been used; Rimestad does occasionally slip into echoes of western classical or jazz traditions, but not for long before skipping back into the unknown. No neat dance tunes to fall back on in this landscape, in which the landmark that Mari Boine &... continue to build can be a symbol, a signpost, for not just the north but for all those meanings that mainstream Euro-American musics don’t reflect. There’s a lot of relevance here for Native America, for example.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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