bark
by Sean
Please note: MP3s are only kept online for a short time, and if this entry is from more than a couple of weeks ago, the music probably won't be available to download any more.


 

[this is the third in a continuing series, exploring the music i discovered when travelling in europe last fall]

We flew from Dublin, via London, to Tampere, Finland. "Manse" is Tampere's nickname - it's the country's Manchester. Tampere is concrete and grey, but like all of Finland (at least the little bit I saw), the space gives everything a feeling of freedom, of life.

Later we went to Helsinki, where boats sat like contented hens in the bay. Parks line the boulevards, with strange and evocative statues - Sibelius, communism, swans.

Between the two cities we took the ultra high-tech high-speed train. And I watched as tall, tall trees spinned past my window, like the stoic older cousins of the familiar Ontario and Quebec landscape. There were knotted forests, fading to blue in the distance.

The CD I bought in Finland is by an avant folk group called Kemialliset Ystävät. I went to a record shop in Tampere and picked albums based entirely on their art. Then I listened. And Alkuhärkä won.

It's a difficult record. From Panda Bear to Black Dice, this sort of psychfolk needs a certain state of mind to take seriously - just what the psych implies. (I've never understood why acts like Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom are given the same label. The differences are really, really clear.) Instruments blend and circle, half-melodies worming out of the soil, receding into it.

Kemialliset Ystävät - "Kiimaniityn Kutsu"
Kemialliset Ystävät - "Kamelin Hikeä"

For me, listening to Kemialliset Ystävät becomes an exercise in fictional ethnography. I don't just imagine the music, the manifestation of the synths, piano, strings, and drone, I imagine a culture that might have produced it. I try to situate the sounds in those tall, leafless trees, down the empty, wide and blowing city streets. It's the sound of the electric cables that run through the woods, and of the people who live in huts under them.

Read more about the record at Fake Jazz.

Elsewhere -

the legend is true: Montreal's grand, big, glowing cross turns purple when the Pope dies. I think it's beautiful that such an enormous monument is on a slow-time, half-century calendar, flickering briefly into a different, ghostly state. I wish I was there to see it.

Unreleased Sam Beam (iron & wine) at buked and scorned.

ftrain updates: the death of a cat. beautiful, very sad.

(main photo taken in the sculpture garden at Tampere's Sara Hilden Art Museum.

Posted by Sean at April 4, 2005 8:44 AM
Comments

Kemialliset Ystävät have been making some of the best music around for a few years now. It's good to see them getting some mp3-blog love.

Posted by ryan at April 4, 2005 3:30 PM

why is it a fictional ethnography?

Posted by Anonymous at April 4, 2005 8:55 PM

Wow, this music is really sick. Thanks

Posted by erojas at April 4, 2005 10:37 PM

anonymous -

It's "fictional" for the same reason that a fantasy novel is distinct from 'non-fiction', as constructed as they both may be. Kemialliset Ystävät seem to me to be making self-consciously "fictional" music, imitating, evoking and bending the typical sound of ethnographic music, field recordings, etc.

Posted by Sean at April 5, 2005 8:35 AM

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Sean Michaels is the founder of Said the Gramophone. He is a writer, critic and author of the theremin novel Us Conductors. Follow him on Twitter or reach him by email here. Click here to browse his posts.

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