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Written in fRoots issue 329/330, 2010
 

JIENAT
Mira
Jienat JNCD002

One of the things about the music covered in fRoots is that, unlike most mainstream music, there’s usually more to it than just what you hear. Sometimes, even, the background is more appealing to the mind than the music to the ear, at least until the two come together, the back-story investing the music with enhanced meaning.
      For example, imagine if the sound of Sámi joiking came not from small populations of traditional reindeer-herders far north of the Arctic Circle but from some British blokes with a mic in a studio in Milton Keynes. But it doesn’t; whether it’s a recording of traditional-style solo joik or expanded with instruments and technology it’s bound up with the place and the people.
Norwegian musician Andreas Fliflet, brother of quirky Bergen accordionist Gabriel Fliflet, lives in the port of Hammerfest in Norway’s extreme northerly county of Finnmark. He’s not Sámi himself, but has long worked with Sámi music and culture, and created the band Jienat, whose debut album Daja was released ten years ago. Its successor Mira, comprising a 5.1 SACD audio disc and the same tracks on a Blu-Ray audio DVD, is composed and meticulously crafted by Fliflet, principally using a 5-microphone surround-sound array in various places including the streets of Bahia, Brazil, a stone church in the Gulf of Bothnia’s Åland islands and Fliflet’s Hammerfest recording room in between plane take-offs and the engine sounds of nearby Russian trawlers.
      At its heart are joik vocals from Fliflet - in one case slightly barmy multi-tracked dog-imitations, in another transferring a joik melody to musical saw - and others including Sámi Marit Hætta Øverli, surrounded by varied percussion, mainly from Fliflet and Fredric Gille but also from Mory Kante’s nephew and balafon player Adama Conde and Väsen’s André Ferrari. The track Gille is built around the ten drummers of Bahia’s Swing Do Pelo.
      Not being equipped with sofa-enveloping surround-sound I can’t comment on that aspect – but the album’s unreverbed, airy sounds and syncopated rhythms work fine in plain stereo.
      www.jienat.com



© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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