LP or Cassette
Second volume of Arja Kastinen's re-interpretations and reassemblages of the music of Iivana Mišukka, a Karelian kantele player recorded to wax cylinder over 100 year ago by Finnish ethnomusicologist, Armas Otto Väisänen. I'll not repeat here the great effort Death Is Not the End have gone to elsewhere to preserve and detail Mišukka's life work (though I will recommend you seek out those words), and instead focus on Kastinen's incredible re-rendering of a music otherwise lost within the dusty annals of some distant archive in Helsinki, or indeed lost completely - some of the original wax cylinders have not survived the passage of time, while some have been converted to tape on a few separate occasions (in mono in the 1960s, stereo in the 1980s). The sound of the music itself? It's a somewhat wondrous, fantastical thing. The kantele is a many stringed traditional instrument with a hollowed out body that creates a zither-like effect, that heard here possesses a near-psychedelic quality that renders time malleable in its transportative qualities, not least I suspect because the music comes from so long ago. The kantele isn't something you might not experience readily, though versions of this sound have crept into more recent recordings - Michael O'Shea's metal stringed guitar, Megabasse, Jon Collin's use of traditional Swedish instrumentation, Dorothy Carter, and perhaps even the homemade zither Blue Lake's Jason Duggan has utilised on several records. Like much of the work of those artists, the results here are truly hypnotic, graceful and often otherworldly. Funny that olde time music made by a very real and modest-living person some 100 years ago could easily soundtrack a dissociative trip into some undefined future time. Is this what they mean by history now being a flat circle? These loops certainly suggest the sense of an eternal return.
FFO: Michael O'Shea, Jon Collin, Dorothy Carter, Megabasse
