Snow kantele

Martti Pokela's Lapland works are moods that have emerged in his thoughts. They are closely entwined with the unusual scales and playing techniques that Martti invents. He has evolved his own original and identifiable musical language from these elements - his music is different from the yoik. It would be easy to invent stories about the dreams of the young Sámi man Nilla, his encounters and experiences, his beloved Nunnu, or the Midges or Nilla's seita, and so on. (A seita is a kind of ancient Sámi stone idol thought to have magic powers.) Martti's subjects seem to deal with spring and love, the buzzing insects that plague southerners, or the earthy wisdom of the Sami wizard. This is a temptation worth avoiding, though. The reward is to have Nilla's Bells ring with a different reindeer every time, sometimes cn route to summer pastures on the coast of Norway, sometimes conserving energy in digging for lichen in the deep of winter; and even Along the Path we contemplate notjust curly birches and gnarled pines but life itself.

Martti writes for the kantele like Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote for the guitar: he uses techniques that are natural and characteristic for the instrument. Through these he has discovered a peculiar palette of colours that he uses in coalescing views of his own personal Lapland, the landscape of his soul.

Martti has brought some pieces to this recording whole and complete, while others have been created in cooperation with Sari and Timo. The contributions of the latter two amount sometimes to arranging and sometimes to composing - certain pieces have been constructed and matured for months, and even in the recording studio some new insights into the original ideas were found. The queen of the kantele family, the concert kantele, is a peculiar instrument in that it has seven tuning levers with which the pitch of all tones can be raised or lowered. They were originally developed to enable the kantele to play in all keys and to play Western classical music. Martti has explored new ways of 'abusing' the tuning levers: he twists them to produce scales that are difficult to write down and sound anarchic and fresh. They do not associate with the concert halls of Central Europe, nor popular music nor even folk music, but perhaps with the fells, the deep valleys, the men and women of the ancient indigenous people and their thoughts.