TUULENKANTAJAT
He!
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 33 (1994)

MARJA MATTLAR
Pariisi Vuorenkylä
Buda 82885-2 (1993)

A klezmer song in Finnish from the 1930s, turn-of-the-century theatre music, a Russian shepherd song, central Finnish polkas, an East Karelian bowed harp tune, a new shanty, a tune with a long enigmatic title, an arrangement for ba-wu and kanteles, and then a bunch of items recorded in a glacial ravine, using clarinets, bouzouki, flutes, kanteles, ba-wu, bass xylophone, accordion, drums, rocks and hay (and - after that interesting collection I can hardly bear to mention it - recorder, dammit) comprising a song influenced by the traditions of the Votyaks, a song about a bear, a tune for a yeti, a song based on the Mordvan tradition and a modern shamanistic incantation sounding like a running commentary on an elephant stampede - and finally back in the studio a calm kantele piece. Mostly done in a cheerfully approximate, uninhibited style - well, pretty rough actually - the sound of people casting off neatness.
      Between their last release in 1991, a fairly disciplined affair of kanteles and rockish backing, and this, Tuulenkantajat (Those Who Carry the Wind) seem to have looked back to their origins as a band exploring the older musics, and undergone the sort of personality change that for some Finns (not just Finns, to be fair) distinguishes Monday morning and Saturday night. Same people, Jekyll and Hyde, or perhaps the Incredible Hulk. It's frightening, really. Good or bad? What's that got to do with it?

      Just about as far from Tuulenkantajat's approach as it's possible to get is Marja Mattlar's Pariisi Vuorenkylä, recorded as the title suggests in Paris, and arranged and produced by Gabriel Yacoub and Patrice Clementin with mainly French musicians. While her songs are in Finnish with some Finnish-sounding melodic features this has the feel of a set of French chansons, or at least a southern European slant; the lyrics' subject matter, too - largely love, actually - seems to fit into that sort of tradition; readers of the booklet, which gives English and French translations, might discover quite a few images close to cliché (or what, were these folk songs, could be described as "recurrent traditional motifs"), but the non-Finnish speaker isn't likely to pick up on that from just listening, and in any case one of the things that can be lost in translation is whether a writer is simply resorting to standard images or using them as cultural reference points. Mattlar's singing has a warm serenity, with a suggestion of controlled passion, particularly attractive and confiding in the lower registers, and the elegant production supports it, surrounding without dominating.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw