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Written in fRoots issue 244, 2003


SANTTU KARHU & TALVISOVAT
Hyvästit Karjala
Hot Igloo HI-004 (2003)

Santtu Karhu’s gravelly voice would make Lemmy sound like a choirboy. He’s a rock singer and songwriter from the eastern, Russian-ruled part of Karjala (Karelia), the land that straddles Finland’s eastern border, and he sings not in Russian but in Karelian, a now little-heard variant of Finnish that was the language of the old runosongs assembled to make the Finnish national epic, Kalevala.
      In 1989, 1990 and 1991, back in the days of the USSR he recorded three vinyl singles in Finland, one with some of the Sibelius Academy folk musicians, the other two with Talvisovat. They were for the small Finnish EiNo label, set up and owned jointly by a group including Hannu Saha, Heikki Laitinen, Kimmo Pohjonen and others in order that musicians they valued could be heard.
      Now there’s a whole album, recorded in the now non-Soviet but still Russian-governed East Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk/Petroskoi, but again for a Finnish label; there is considerable fellow-feeling among Finns for the Karelians on the other side of the border who suffered the bulldozering, cultural loss and poverty of Sovietisation and Russification. The line-up of Talvisovat has changed, except for two long-time Karhu stalwarts: mandolin, accordion and harmonica player Arto Rinne, now also of East Karelian bands Myllarit and the Karelian Folk Music Ensemble, and guitarist Feodor Astashoff.
      The lyrics aren’t translated, even into Finnish (though a Finnish-speaker would probably get most of the meaning), in the booklet or on the band’s website, so I can’t relay much of an idea of the content of the songs, but from the titles and what I can discern it seems there are at least some references to Karelian nature, perhaps politics too. Musically it’s a hefty folk-rockish sound with some interesting textures and turns; its influences are more audibly mainstream rock than relating much to Karelian traditional music apart from a touch of joik-style singing, and the sounds of guest Aleksander Leonov’s folk flutes, horns and jouhikko. (And, probably best ignored, there are a couple of jolly-jiggy between-verse breaks, western-Euro-folky rather than Karelian). But in much Finnish rock there still seems to me to be some influence of the old narrow pitch range of runosong – the tunes tend not to spread over a scale much wider than runosong’s fifth or so, and there are some present-day distinctively Finnic songwriting melodic shapes and progressions - and that character is here too. Indeed it’s an album that, like Karhu (which, appropriately for his vocal sound, means “bear”), certainly has character, and he’s the only Karelian-language singer of any profile that there is.


© 2003 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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Kansanmusiikki-instituutti (Finland's national Folk Music Institute).

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