Siipi Empii by Kemialliset Ystävät

IKU-053

This album is also available in cassette format and digital download from Leaving Records. https://kemiallisetystavat.bandcamp.com/album/siipi-empii-2

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Kemialliset Ystävät is a long running musical collective headed by
Finnish multimedia artist Jan Anderzén. The groups rotating
contributors include virtuosic musicians, sound artists, mad
electronic music professors, field recorders, singers, amateurs and
professionals. Ikuisuus presents the projects latest LP,
entitled Siipi Empii (loosely translated from Finnish to A Wing
Hesitates.) Anderzén explains, "The English translation
unfortunately loses all the music and rhyme of the Finnish title but
the meanings still there, kind of. The title is aiming to describe
the movements of a butterfly and the weight/heat of the idea that
every single flap of the wing can cause a storm/revolution." He has
described the groups sound as sometimes "like an orchestra flying
around in a tornado." These themes embody Siipi Empii, a wildly
weird dose of electronic folk music crafted through sheer force of
nature, an abstract organism guided gently by Anderzéns deft
artistic touch.

A collaborative spirit can be heard throughout each of the albums
twelve imaginative tracks. According to Anderzén, "The music stays
alive only because of the input from my collaborators … The method
produces half random, half directed sound events where independent
elements intertwine into unpredictable music." As part of the
process, he sends out "musical skeletons" to his collaborators. They
then react and contribute their own sounds and ideas. One batch of
skeletons came with a motivational letter including a quote from
Johan Huizinga, below:

We moderns have lost the sense for ritual and sacred play. Our
civilization is worn with age and too sophisticated. But nothing
helps us to regain that sense so much as musical sensibility. In
feeling music we feel ritual. In the enjoyment of music, whether it
is meant to express religious ideas or not, the perception of the
beautiful and the sensation of holiness merge, and the distinction
between play and seriousness is whelmed in that fusion.

Siipi Empii's compelling arrangements do contain a playful edge
that softens its more experimental tendencies. Unpredicability is
the order of the day, as dogs bark, springs boing, and electronic
woodwind sections deconstruct themselves over beds of contemplative
marimbas. Disembodied voices recite touching poetry, just more
instruments playing freely in the endlessly mutating stream of
sound. Every element feels perfectly weighed and expertly arranged,
as if by gravity itself. Anderzén says: "Battles with gravity are a
recurring theme in my work, something to do with changing
perceptions of normal." Siipi Empii is a joyous and playful
paradox, beckoning you to embrace its loopy strain of intensely
original expression.

Ikuisuus and Kemialliset Ystävät make sense together. Both
entities have a passion for blurring the lines of genre and
exploring creative new frontiers. In Anderzéns words, "The work
needs to be free from predetermined themes or ambitions."
Experimentation is the ideal, and the process is sacred. They strive
to find a language to convey something that cant be expressed with
words. You may hear and feel something you've never heard or felt
before, and that is the aim. Perhaps Anderzén best encapsulates the
album in his translation of the first tracks title: "Äimä is an
ancient word for a large needle with a big round hole. In an old
Finnish saying äimä describes a reaction where ones jaw drops open
in awe / confusion. Tähkä is an ear in the botanical meaning. So
we are talking about some sort of potential for astonishment."

HOWDY