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Wimme
(vim' - mae) Arctic Circle Shamans Shamanistic chant meets modern electronics |
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Often
achingly beautiful and starkly ornamented, Yoik, the ancient chant of
a Native Arctic people, uses sound to describe its subject. It is almost
a lost art. Wimme Saari learned the craft from archival records at the
national radio station in Helsinki. "Colors and patterns are
emerging in my mind-I have to let them guide me" says Wimme." "The added instrumentation intensifies the feeling, so on a piece like "Thunder Born" you feel a mythic, impending storm, and on "Fog" the whole world seems to close in and shut down. " "The yoiking of Wimme is nestled into an electronic landscape of Artic tundra and star-woven sky. You feel as the heavens themselves have opened onto you as the dance of the aurora borealis. For lovers of Ambient, this album goes far beyond the wary Anglo-American product. " What happens when tradition meets modernity? In many cases, tradition loses. But not in all cases. In remote parts of Scandinavia Norway, Finland and Sweden live the people called Saami - one of the few aborginal peoples in Europe. Their music, called Yoik, resembles Native American music. Wimme Saari is from Finnish Lapland. He marries the traditional Jojk style of Saami music with new age. Vimme's approach could be called "free yoik." He vocally mimmicks airplane propellers and outboard motors...with expressive falsettos, accompanied by modern percussion. The art of yoiking has traditionally been transferred through generations, but Wimme learned it in a more modern way: "I started working at the Finnish Broadcasting Company in '86. There I found some tapes including my uncles yoiking. With the help of those tapes I learned some of the old tradition. Although my mother comes from an old yoiking family, the direct connection from one generation to another had already been broken..." |
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