| Review by sacd-fan February 1, 2012 (3 of 3 found this review helpful)
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Maybe you know that: You stumble over a CD in a shop and you just buy it, because there is just some positive attraction or feeling in your stomach - and later it turns out, that it had been exactly the right choice.
I am not sure, how to categorise this music. Maybe it is something between avantgarde and experimental folk.
Gunnar Idenstam mainly is an organist but also a composer who tries to merge different musical styles.
For that recording he assembled a team of five other musicians.
The reason for the project was the 400th anniversary of the village Jukkasjärvi in northern Sweden.
The tracks are a voyage through the eight seasons of a year in Lapalnd.
Persons who already visited Lapland might remember the silent ans in somekind minimalistic beauty of nature there. This can be felt in many of the tracks. But on the other side there is spring and summertime, where nature literally explodes and everything is full of live 24 hours. Also this dynamic range can be found in some tracks.
A typical Scandinavian element in that musik is the "yoik", the musical tradition of the Sami which is merged with organ, violin, saxophone, percussion and also synthetic sounds. As I said: I am not sure about the musical category.
The lyrics of the songs are partly Swedisch or meän kieli (a Finnisch dialect) but also Sami. For many listeners this would be the first time to get in touch with that language.
On the technical side the recording is just brilliant. Even if the CD and 2CH tracks are very impressive, the Multichannel tracks are the real jewel on the disc. It just seems that the SACD would have to be invented to show this music, if it had not been invented before.
The listener literally gets involved in the music. There is no front or rear, which would mean "primary" and "secondary" direction. Voices and instruments appear everywhere in the room and create a new surprise every few seconds. Good for those who have the same speakers for front and rear.
Also the subwoofer gets a lot work to do. I can not remember any other non-Techno recording to have that kind of low frequencies. Well, you should aks your neighbor for permission to play the disc. He might be annoyed :-)
But all this high tech in the recording does not cover a musical performance which might not be too good - on the contrary! Alltogether they make a fine piece of art, which is exactly in the correct balance to be enjoyed many times.
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