Search - Girls of Angeli :: New Voice of North

The Girls of Angeli are Sámi, formerly known as Laplanders, the indigenous people of Northern Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia--a nomadic culture that probably descended from the people who came into the area after the last ice age, about 5,000 years ago. Sámi vocal music is called joiking and it isn't singing, speaking, or chanting, but it has qualities of all three, depending on the joik. Joiking is a method of purifying the self and creating harmony between the world we can see and the saivo--the perfect unseen world--and sounds at times like the singing of the Northern Plains tribes of North America. This album compiles tracks from the three Finnish albums the Girls recorded as Annel Nieddat; there are a couple of tracks with modern rock backing and a bit of ambient window dressing here and there, but most of it is fairly straightforward a cappella joiking, accompanied by traditional drumming that won't distract you from the chilling strangeness of the joiks, or the haunting beauty of the two lead vocalists. --j. poet