White brings together two fearless sonic explorers – Norwegian-Sámi sonic shaman-magician Torgeir Vassvik, who represents the Sámi second wave of music and has developed a highly personal expression that transformed traditional Sámi melodies into animistic avant-garde Joik by a collective improvisational process, and Finnish-Norwegian experimental-producer guitarist Juhani Silvola, whose electro-acoustic work and sound design are concerned with rhythm and phrasing in their widest sense, idiosyncratic melodic trajectories and the creation of the deepest, most animated timbres and textures as possible.
Vassvik and Silvola have been playing together since 2022 and kept improvising and experimenting with songs from Vassvik’s rich repertoire. The album White was recorded and mixed by Silvola at Studio K16 in Oslo, mastered by Audun Strype, who joins the duo in their performances and released by Silvola’s label, Eight Nerve Audio. It is a futurist, avant-Joik, or Joik Noir, a Sámi-Finnish-Norwegian synergy that captures ancient, powerful rituals, spells and chants and dresses them with post-modern, imaginative and innovative sonic wizardry.
White offers eight timeless pieces that melt the traditional Sám Joik songs with surprising sounds and charge this meeting with raw, urgent energy. Silvola’s guitars – acoustic and electric throughout most of the album reference the rhythmic patterns of the Middle-Eastern oud. Silvola ornaments «The Ritual» with distorted electric guitar noises, and let the instrumental «Ancestors Push» ring with futurist, ambient sounds. Vassvik’s vocals and his playing on the Jew’s harp and the traditional frame drum Govvadas adapt immediately and organically to such unchartered, genre-defying sonic terrains.
Vassvik and Silvola go into a cathartic, trance-like and feedback-laden dance in «In The Intertidal Zone» and turn «That Girl» into an openly emotional, mysterious ballad. The last piece «The Mountain Is Crying» completes this journey into unknown sonic territories with «The Mountain Is Crying» where both Vassvik and Silvola sound as if they are totally possessed by this powerful Sámi song in his futurist incarnation, true to Sámi belief that everything is connected, and everything is alive.
Eyal Hareuveni
Torgeir Vassvik (Joik vocals, guitar, munnharpe, Govvadas frame drum), Juhani Silvola (prepared guitar, electronics)
