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Written in fRoots issue 323, 2010
 

TORGEIR VASSVIK
Sápmi
Idut ICD092 (2009)

OLE LARSEN GAINO
Ludiin Muitalan
DAT DATCD-48 (2009)

Torgeir Vassvik is a magnetic and individual live performer (read my enthusiasm for his sets at FolkeLarm in fR319/320), among the most fascinating and intense of Sámi contemporary joikers. How does that transfer to the purely audio medium of CD?
2006’s Sáivu was produced by a major figure of the new minimalist Norwegian jazz, Arve Henriksen, and Vassvik worked very well with his characteristic approaches of Henriksen’s misty trumpet and electronics over Anders Jormin’s double bass and the clicking, rumbling, airy spaciousness of new-Norwegian percussion.
      Sápmi is his second album, the first with members of his current band, and continues in the minimalist, organic vein that, while often involving rhythmic patterns very pleasingly eschews obvious rhythms or beat-application. Vassvik’s own battered acoustic guitar makes appearances this time, together with the ingenious spoon-twanging instrument-modifications of guitarist and producer Jan Martin Smørdal, unusual double bass sound-extractions by Jo Berger Myhre, percussion and touches of unconventional sound making from violin, trumpet and sax.
      The deep, winding guitar pattern of Fális – The Whale In The Stone, Inside The Birch Tree, underpinning dark, husky, edgy joiking alternating with episodes of trumpet and distant shouts, is followed in Uvssot - Open by time-pausing stereo guitar-string-scratching and disturbing shifting, hissing drones with interjections of suppressed, mumbling, almost agonised joik. Later he uses a Mongolian vocal technique, not the whistling overtone type but the deep chest-grinding bass, again over an insistent acoustic guitar pattern; he’s clearly found useful connections with the sounds and rhythms of other hard-winter peoples.
      So the album successfully makes its own pictures, but try to see him live to get the full Vassvik experience. At FolkeLarm one director of several big festivals around the world, bright-eyed and forsaking a booker’s usual inscrutability, booked him on the spot; one hopes others, including perhaps a British one, will follow suit.
      www.idut.no

      Traditional joik is unaccompanied, not a performance but a very personal expression of the personality of another person, an event, an animal, a place or the joiker’s mood, part of the soundtrack to the work and travelling of Sámi traditional life. A whole album of a string of solo joiks can be more of a document than a good through-listen. What distinguishes and elevates Ludiin Muitalan, which deservedly won the “Documentation” award in 2009’s Norwegian folk music prizes, is that Ole Larsen Gaino (Lásse Ovllá in Sámi), a fine joiker of the older generation, is recorded in situations where joik has always arisen - the tundra in summer, in a lávvu (Sámi tipi), rowing a boat, working with the reindeer herd, while skiing.
      Johan Sara Jr., himself a leading contemporary joiker (his own albums are recommended, particularly the powerful, gritty techno of Boska), has spent time with Ole over six years, and Ludiin Muitalan is the audio result. In the five tracks, each of which contains several joiks, the sounds of the various environments around him – swarms of summer insects, the splashing of oars, the swishing of his skis, the croak of a raven, the clanking of the reindeer bells – with Ole’s voice sometimes in the foreground, sometimes more distant, make a sound picture that gives a real sense of the essential connectedness of joiking to Sámi traditional life. (Incidentally, the package, in a touching reversal of the usual copyright situation, bears the note “Where a composer is not specifically mentioned, the person who is joiked – the title of the track – is the owner and obtains all the rights to the joik”).
      www.dat.net


© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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