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Written in fRoots issue 208, 2000


VÄRTTINÄ
Ilmatar
Wicklow 09026 63678 2 (2000)

In the past fifteen or so years the new Finnish roots musicians have been increasingly exploring the huge legacy of Finno-Ugrian runo-song, part of the old layer of northern music that came before rhyming and fiddles, and with Ilmatar Värttinä has succeeded in making a classic statement of the old ways’ power and relevance in modern music. It’s a landmark album that lives and breathes the runolaulu form, which usually has a compass of only a fifth but derives its interest and melodic variation from changes of pattern and rhythmic stress within that limited range.
      The songs are new-written or built around traditional themes by band members, and they compare well with the tradition of which they’re a continuation. Instrumentation ranges from big and graunchy to sparse, with a range and variety liberated from the singers-plus backing band format. The vocals have come together dramatically in the last couple of albums, and here present an even more impressive version of the familiar hard unison sound, softened to the personal in solo passages or expanded on something of the Bulgarian model into vibrant polyphony. Many albums ago an occasional cloth-eared reviewer after a superficial listen compared Värttinä to Les Voix Mystères, presumably because both featured women singing together using tight-throat voices. Now, while there’s no great similarity, the excitement of that Balkan harmonic sense brings a very natural and non-destructive extra dimension to the old runolaulu monophony.
      The worthless-suitor railing Käppee revels in the sounds and syllabic rhythms of the Finnish language in fast, aspirating acapella, and the final track Meri, beginning with an aching solo voice and opening out into soaring edgy polyphony, intertwines an archive recording of a Hungarian woman sobbing a Finno-Ugrian style itku-virsi with a lament raging against the life-taking sea.
      On Aijo, with its incanted spell from popular Finnish rock singer Ismo Alanko, there’s what might be viewed as a touch of Hedningarna style approach, but it’s just a path-crossing in the evolutionary expansion of natural and exciting ways to interpret this primal, insistent runo-music that has also been one component of Hedningarna’s song-material. There’s no polska or halling here, it’s Finno-Ugrian not Scandinavian, and in core instrumentation (which on this track features jouhikko, the horsehair-stringed bowed lyre) as well as in general sound and in essence the two bands are on different roads. Of course, Ilmatar was produced by a man who was blazing a still-glowing trail for rich acoustic-electric roots graunch way back in the 1970s: former Malicorne producer and bass player Hughes de Courson. He hasn’t lost his touch.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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

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