Audio By Carbonatix
For just a few moments near the end of “Boadan Nuppi Bealde,” Mari Boine briefly launches Eight Seasons (NorthSide) into the realm of the eternal, an obscure and not necessarily welcoming abode that few pop albums venture into. The subject of Boine’s “Boadan Nuppi Bealde” — which means “I Come From the Other Side” in the language of Norway’s arctic Sámi people and alludes to the unseen world of the spirit — seems as vague and open-ended as a college English major’s notebook scribblings. At first the poetry doesn’t sound particularly evocative. “Your words scented, filled with unspoken invitations, me forever searching,” she sings as Bugge Wesseltoft’s synthesizer quivers and jazzster Jan Garbarek’s tenor saxophone adds a sensual voice in counterpoint to Boine’s. “If you would only say my name,” she urges someone or something, and her unspoken question trails off into a fog of layered keyboards and synthesized percussion.
Just as the moody disc opener winds down, Boine shifts to a Sámi vocal expression called the joik, and for a few stunning seconds she hoists her performance into a higher plane. Up until that moment, Boine was singing a song; but suddenly the song is singing her as she breaks into a potent stream of “hey-hey-hey” vocables with an intensity that puts the wailing sax and synthesizer to shame. If your neck hairs don’t bristle at the sound of this unexpected answer from the other side, then you probably don’t have neck hairs. It is a remarkable moment unlike anything usually achieved in pop music and unmatched by the rest of Eight Seasons. In fact, “Liegga Gokcas Sis'” (“In a Blanket of Warmth”) and “Silba Várjala” (“Let Silver Protect”) also contain fine examples of Boine’s joiks, but they don’t have the same impact as “Boadan Nuppi Bealde.”
No one knows for certain, but joiking probably originated in the chanted vision songs of Sámi shamans. This improvised style of singing that is less about actual words than melody and vocal textures also became part of the larger Sámi culture. A person could joik about a hunt, a frozen stream, or the birth of a baby. But what makes these fluid songs unique, freeing them from fixed rules on melody and subject matter, is that they aren’t considered to be about something. The joik, and by extension the joiker, are said to actually personify the subject by sharing its spiritual essence through the act of singing. So when Boine seeks an affirmation from a nameless power or lover, her joik returns the very answer that she seeks, giving the final moments of “Boadan Nuppi Bealde” enormous energy. And you don’t have to believe in spirits or channeling to experience the rush. Call her joik the summoning of the unconscious or a wordless connection with the deepest archetype of song itself, and its surge is equally impressive.
Joiking smelled of pantheism to members of the Scandinavian revivalist Laestadian Lutheran movement, who moved into Sámiland (a.k.a. Lapland) in the Nineteenth Century and began discrediting native customs and art forms while they sought to make Christian converts. When Boine was a teenager in the small village of Gámehhisnjárga, the Laestadian Sámi community discouraged her interest in joiking not only because her assertiveness defied the Laestadian view of a woman’s subordinate place in society, but also because her music asserted the worth of traditional Sámi culture. The folk music revival that swept Scandinavia in the late Seventies helped Boine gain a national voice. The politically charged songs on her first album, Jaskatvuooa Manná, released on Norway’s Iduit label in 1985, were often critical of the Norwegian government. Though invited to participate in the opening ceremonies of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Boine refused on the grounds that her performance could be interpreted as supporting the political administration of Prime Minister Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland. Boine had repeatedly challenged Brundtland to apologize for the government’s long history of interference in Sámi affairs.
As the decade wore on, Boine’s music supplanted militancy with a kind of natural mysticism that celebrated life and the environment. But her paeans sometimes seemed a little simplistic. “Song for the Unborn,” the second track on Eight Seasons, undermines the power of the closing moments of “Boadan Nuppi Bealde” with a lullaby sung in English and Sámi that somehow feels generic despite her unusual way of addressing her unborn child as “the little wing under my skin.” “Butterfly” relies upon the soggy device of a “butterfly trapped in a mould of molten steel” to suggest the conflict between the manmade and natural worlds. The problem with both songs has as much to do with delivery as lyrics. Despite her fluent English, Boine nearly always deadens her music when she strays from her native tongue to pop vocal cadences. Unlike Finnish joiker Wimme Saari, who has never recorded an actual lyric for his four CDs on the NorthSide label, Boine is first and foremost a singer who only joiks occasionally; her chosen style is world music-flavored pop. Ironically the limitations of pop are what give her joiking moments such a jolt, as she suddenly knocks down a wall we never even suspected existed.
The singing, songwriting, and musicianship on Eight Seasons are high caliber and the songs have a quiet strength that unfolds after repeated listening. “Boadan Nuppi Bealde” is the exception. You’ll hear its power the first time through. But don’t buy Eight Seasons for a single song. Buy it for a moment within that song, a moment that few other pop vocalists can touch.
