| · If you subsisted on a diet of reindeer innards, salt cod and birch bark, you'd probably want to joik, too.
The Sami, an indigenous people in Norway, Sweden, Finland and northern Russia, have their own culture, history, language and way of life. Naturally, they also have their own music, the joik, a throaty sort of singing that lies somewhere on the continuum between belching and chanting.
Over the last six years, Finnish Sami Wimme Saari has contemporized his ancestral vocal tradition for international audiences by merging it with electronic beats and other instrumentation. Now, on Instinct – Solo Joik, Wimme goes it alone with his golden throat to showcase a more introspective side of his joiking personality. As hypnotic as the bare-bones approach may be, authenticity freaks should beware – although some of the joiks on the disc date back to the 1800s, most of the material is rooted in Wimme’s present-day experience, leaving some of us longing to sing the lyrics in translation. My personal favourite: "Have you ever sawed the ice with a chainsaw?/ You can quickly make a hole in the ice with it."
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