Jienat: Mira (2010) [Blu-ray]

Ah, the joy of joiking. The Sami artist Wimme Saari earned renown for his combination of shamanistic chants and evocative electronics: the human voice bumping up against chilly technology, creating a frisson out of the organic/inorganic juxtaposition. One could say that the art of joiking has an abstractness to it: the Sami people use joiks to sing the essence of a person, a place, an animal. Joiking is a deep, ancient form of communication, and as such the essence is deeply grounded: a magical form of concretely embodying the spirit of things. On Mira, listeners are treated to the Sami language, one form of which is only utilized by roughly six hundred people living on the Russian Kola peninsula.

Jienat’s album Mira heads down a different road than travelled by artists like Wimme or Mari Boine. The musician who is the force behind Jienat, Andreas Fliflet, has gone to great lengths to ensure that the recording of the musicians is as close to a live, immersive experience as possible: the CD comes packaged with a regular SACD, and a Blu-Ray, Hi-Definition version. Fliflet states in the liner notes that this is the first non-classical album to be recorded in 5.1 surround sound; the musicians were captured with multiple microphones to convey the sense of space, at very different locations, in which the music was created. The energy of each moment is thus conveyed in crystal-clear fashion.

On the whole, Mira puts the focus squarely on pared down, wholly organic and human sounds. Jienat have created a playful release, and each tune is varied enough so that it feels a bit like experimental pop-joik: Mira may be the White Album of the genre!

*** This music is made in the northernmost town on Earth– Hammerfest, Norway, less than 20 lines of latitude from the North Pole. Our recording studio is 150 metres from the edge of the arctic ocean.
Some lyrics are in languages that are spoken by merely 5- 600 persons.

Треклист:
01. Sissel
02. Andreas/Andre
03. Angelique
04. Dancehall
05. Radio Belgrano
06. Fredrik Albert
07. Mira
08. Adama
09. Tudeer
10. Gille
11. August Samuel