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Written in fRoots issue 226, 2002


PINIARTUT
Piniartut
Tutl SHD 51 (2001)

The screaming, growling waves of new Nordic music typified by Hedningarna’s second and third albums seem to have been crashing less frequently on our shores of late, but the white water returns with this album from Piniartut, a formation comprising Finnish ex-Hedningarna singer Tellu Virkkala, Greenlandic singer Rasmus Lyberth, Faroese pianist Kristian Blak and Finnish fiddler/multi-instrumentalist Ville Kangas.
      Chattering runo-songs from Tellu, deep intoning and lyrical baritone from Lyberth, melt-water drops of piano from Blak, and Kangas showing that he’s one of Finland’s wildest, most inventively melodic fiddlers. And sometimes all of those things at once, in a sparkling production in which the masterly hand of engineer Antti Rintamäki at Kaustinen’s Soiva Kivi studio is evident, expanding, layering and intensifying in a bold foreground and intriguing distant glimpses so the listener, instead of latching on to a particular instrument, is opened up to the conjuring of imagery.
      The title “Piniartut” derives from the Greenlandic word “piniartoq”, meaning “hunter”, and the album, while a complete work as music alone and not heavily conceptish to listen to, is part of a forthcoming DVD production, a joint project by Faroese, Icelandic and Greenlandic institutions to be released by Tutl, which has a theme of hunting and fishing in the North. The CD, however, tends mostly to fishing, and material relating to it. So we get a Greenlandic translation of the Finnish runo-song of the smith Ilmarinen forging a giant eagle to catch the mighty fish of Death, a spell for good fishing luck, a song of a drowning woman, one about runo-hero Väinämöinen fishing, and two Blak/Lyberth pieces based on traditional Greenlandic drum dance tunes, plus a couple of fishing-related Shetland tunes (the latter perhaps an almost uncomfortable lurch into melodic familiarity for a British Isles listener).


© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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