KIRI-UU - Samples, Synthesis and Cultural Memory

VICKI BENN

The Australian-base electronic music duo Kiri-uu are remarkable for having established a nexus between contemporary, high-tech, avant garde practice and traditional forms of Estonian folk music. Their work does not simply comprise another instance of postmodern fusion - of some new, supposedly 'transational' pop aesthetic - but rather provides a subtler exploration of notions of cultural 'authenticity' and exchange. The group was formed in 1987, as a principally choral outfit, and initially comprised twelve members. Difficulties in touring an ensemble of this size lead the group to reduce down to a duo comprising founder member Olev Muska (arranger, producer and vocalist) and Coralie Joyce (vocals, sound mixer and visual co-ordinator). Muska came to music after an education in the visual arts and is a self-taught musician, whereas Joyce has a classical background and also teaches piano and voice. The duo produce music in their Sydney studio using samplers, synthesizers and music sequencing software; and perform live by processing these pre-recorded sources in combination with live vocals. The group's two recordings (self titled [1987] and Ingrian Evenings [1993]) have been self produced in Muska's home studio and have been distributed in Australia and Estonia.

The Estonian influence on the band's work derives from Muska's ethnic background. Although born in Australia, Muska has retained a strong identity with the Estonian homeland of his parents, who emigrated to Australia after World War Two and the Soviet occupation of the Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). The band's name Kiri-uu directly reflects this background, being a sound taken to approximate the noises of a swing in the wind in Estonian. This has a political context in that the swing is something of a subversive icon in Estonia. Before the Soviet occupation in 1940, large communal swings were a focal point of activity in Estonian communities. After the occupation they, and many other cultural institutions and practices, were banned, with this ban staying in force until Estonia's move to independence in the late 1980s. Kiri-uu - with its hard 'K' syllable a notable feature of the Estonian tongue - here speaks for the systematic repression of local languages during the occupation years.

Kiri-uu's main musical project is the reinterpretation - and revitalisation - of Finno-Ugric (Eastern Baltic) folk songs and their originating culture. The source of their material is the contemporary arrangements of traditional Ingrian folk songs written by the prominent Estonian composer Veljo Tormis. The group samples fragments of their own performances of these pieces of music and uses these as the basis of fresh interpretative compositions. Their approach to composition and musical style is also distinctly different from what is usually conceived of as 'World Music' and evades convenient categorisation (with the band themselves coining such terms as 'desktop accapella' and 'choral grunge' to describe their sound(1)). In their latest recording and song cycle, Ingrian Evenings, the songs run together and the vocal sounds used range from live solo voice through to repetitive, sampled choral 'washes'. The voice is used as a key sound source and is modified in speed and pitch, and by delays and echoes, transforming into various seemingly 'inhuman' sounds and repetitive phrases. Other prominent sounds include overlaid radio signals, static noise, and a variety of honks, drones, bells and percussion sounds; with these being layed over a monotonous bassline which bounces between two notes.

While Kiri-uu's live performances resemble those of outfits like Kraftwerk, with the duo appearing to deliver their performances impassively from behind banks of 'cold' black boxes, the duo do not however aim to produce intentionally 'cold' or intellectually abstracted music. Their deadpan style actually relates to their rejection of the notion of charisma, referring in turn to the Finno-Ugric shamanistic culture in which song is not (primarily) a means of self-expression (as Veljo Tormis states "I do not use folk song, it is folk song which uses me"(2)). While the band cite contemporary composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich as influences, they regard their music as still having a populist appeal - an aspect important to their cultural project and their relation to contemporary Estonian culture. The Ingrian Evenings cycle attempts to bridge both forms through mixing harmonic and melodic passages with dissonant and atonal sections, to create a work which is, by turns, dizzyingly carnivalesque and repetitive and monotonous. There are therefore (at least) two discourses co-existing in their music, one around culture and tradition and another around technology and transformation.

Muska and Joyce are concerned with the revitalisation of an oral culture which has been systematically oppressed during years of Soviet occupation but which also stands in contrast to dominant Western European culture. The Estonian language is part of the Finno-Ugric group of languages which connect a number of communities in the Eastern Baltic region and is closely related to both the Finnish and Sami (Lappish) languages. Unlike Finland however, which has been open to Western and, most particularly, Scandinavian influences over the last fifty years, Estonian culture has been sheltered from such influences. Instead, it has retained a sense of its traditions in direct opposition to the attempted 'Russification' of its culture by the settling of immigrants from other Russian republics in its territory and through the mass deportation of Estonians to remote parts of the Soviet Union immediately after World War Two. Traditional nomadic people from the region suffered an even harsher fate, being herded into settlements that are now acknowledged by the present Russian government as "constituting the worst living and social conditions in the former USSR" (cited in Campbell, 32). Veljo Tormis has refered to the Finno-Ugric peoples (the Baltic Finns) as, the "Red Indians of Europe" and gone on to assert that they "have a tragic history... (they) have been trampled from both East and West by so-called liberators during the two great wars of this century"(3). Material circumstances have not improved appreciably since Estonian independence from the USSR in 1991 however, with the immense restructuring the country has had to undergo resulting in hyper-inflation and high unemployment. As commentators such as Paul Hockenos have argued, the West is also to blame in this, since the severe terms of policies implemented by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) are currently "straining Eastern European economies to the brink of collapse" (Hockenos, 4).

Along with economic reconstruction, Estonian culture is having to reconstruct its former dominant, 'organic' national culture from fragments and records of cultural practice retained in archives and universities during the Soviet occupation. These locations remained a safe haven for such collections, it seems, since the Soviet administation viewed such academic preservation as less likely to provoke a resurgence of Estonian nationalism than any residual popular customs or popular uses of language. Much 'subversive' nationalist activity during the period of occupation therefore took place in scholarly contexts, in the preservation and analysis of endangered cultural forms. This tradition provides the basis and context for Tormis and Muska's work with fragments of traditional folk song - these often being the only remaining traces of disappearing regional languages.

Kiri-uu's use of advanced technologies does not represent an awkward attempt to somehow bring these fragments of endangered culture into the contemporary (and supposedly multi-national) cultural space in a new, transformed form and context but is rather a careful complementary enterprise. When Muska and Joyce discuss the technology they use, it is less often in abstract, formalist terms, than in terms of its inherent compatability with Finno-Ugric cultural and linguistic structures. In contrast to most Indo-European languages, which are primarily linear and goal orientated, Finno-Ugric languages are rhythmic and structurally fragmented, with each individual linguistic element more independent and able to operate in isolation. Muska's compositional approach aims to reflect this and, he argues, approaches songs "structurally rather than in terms of the exposition of melody" (the more traditional European approach). This allies his style to traditional Baltic Finnish vocal forms such as the runic song ('rune' being the Finnish word for poem). In this form, the lead singer and the chorus alternate, with monotonous repetition of a central motif producing a characteristic chain singing pattern (which, in shamanistic cultures, was perceived to be 'spiritually charged'). One of the key characteristics of such linguistic and musical structures is that they are not strictly set but allow for variation. Another vocal form which has influenced their work is the Sami joiku (which has been dated back to the Mesolithic era(4)). This form, unlike the Western form of the song, is primarily a non-verbal, agogic, creative vocal utterance. The term joiku derives from the Lappish transitive verb juoigat, meaning 'to sing someone or something'(5) (in distinction to singing about something)(5). The word elements do not 'mean' in the same (notionally direct) sense of conventional Western words but, as T. Leisio notes in his study 'Joiku Songs in Samiland' (Leisio, 1986), more closely relate to the notion of tecta (meaning 'hidden'), "whereby words are charged with a large information content, meaning is not fixed but highly suggestive and culturally encoded, and aesthetics are linked to vowel sounds and voiced consonants" (Leisio, 1986).

In an elegant symmetry, one of the most common forms of joiku is built around the phrase 'lo le lo le'. This form is also a dominant motif in Ingrian Evenings whose regular +0 +0 structure closely resembles the binary code of the computers integral to Kiri-uu's performances. The computer, and its methods of data storage, representation and recombination, facilitate an approach to sound construction which is used prominenetly by Muska in his compositions. The composer refers to this technique as 'aural cross-stitching' and describes it as a process by which syllables or song elements are typed vertically and horizontally into computer files in order to allow 'different linear relationships' to be constructed. These solid mathematical relationships are then drawn upon by Muska to interpret song cycles in a manner he describes as "processing along the lines of the essence of thought"(6). This returns us to the structural underpinnings of Finno-Ugric culture - while isolated syllables and signs may appear detached from meaning they are in fact units of saturated (diachronic) meaning. This in turn allows for polyphony, an approach particularly suited to computer music and an approach which Edward Said has argued, reflects a certain "inhabiting of time" which contrasts to "Western homophony's [grounding in] development and domination"(7).

Technology here is not seen as a cold, restricting force opposed to culture and tradition but rather a medium which can be inflected and inscribed. Relating basic units of computer information, such as the bit and the pixel, to basic units of the song cycles, Muska talks about Kiri-uu's work as "putting a spell" on these "molecules" of meaning. The group's use of images in their stage shows continues this theme, using visual technology to conjure phantoms of memory - an image of a peasant mother transforms from a realist photograph into a heavily pixillated image to symbolise the effects of nuclear pollution from poorly maintained reactors, while another image of barbed wire layed across Estonian beaches by the Soviets, transforms into a Baltic tapestry. As perceived by Muska, bits and pixels, fundamental units of information in the 'post-metaphysical west', become seemingly charged with pre-Christian anima...

The same simplicity of the joiku's structure which allows it to be manipulated in the manner described above has also allowed a new generation of Sami to set about reinterpreting the joiku with contemporary Western instrumentation and to market it as indigenous pop music. Muska sees this as evidence of the vitality of Sami culture and sees it as a welcome contrast to the attempts of Finno-Ugric expatriate communities in Australia and elsewhere to attempt to preserve an idealised, pristine version of their perceived cultural heritage through practices such as the donning of folk costumes for communal weekend and holiday events (what Said has termed "the antique representation of self so acceptable to the powers that be"(8)). The affinity between Kiri-uu's project and the renaissance of Estonian culture taking place in its Baltic homeland has lead to them being warmly received there. in 1989 they opened a major concert in the Estonian capital of Tallinin with a piece built around versions of the word Tere (Hello) - a sound unexpectedly taken up by the crowd, resonating as it did with the promise of a new begining for their culture. (By contrast, Laurie Anderson's performances, which process the sounds of similar basic words, are more likely to be understood by Western audiences as the disembodied voicings of contemporary fractured subjectivity.)

Joyce and Muska recall the Tallinin concert as a powerful experience, and describes himself as one of "the ghosts that went missing after the war returning in a new form and entering into people's consciousness". Yet Kiri-uu's philosophy is more complex than that of a simple return to ethnic homelands, Muska and Joyce emphasise the importance of their location in Austalia, at a distance from the roots of the culture they interpret. On one level this relates to a post-imperialist notion of culture where "locality doesn't refer to specific geography or community but to a shared sense of place" (Frith, 268) and where, as Muska argues, "the idea of nation breaks down while culture is consolidated". Yet there is a tension here, for all that Kiri-uu have thrived at one remove from their notional originating culture, their return to that culture has been facilitated by an international revival of nationalism which, while not necessarily rooted in Finno-Ugric culture, has been a cornerstone of the campaign for independence in the Baltic States.

Post histoire claims about the triumph of slick consumer capitalism and the end of the nation state deny the ways in which the 'received genre' of the statist project operates in many campaigns for political independence. As Dipresh Chakrabarty points out "we are not yet at the mercy of capital... citizenship is alive and kicking" and "there is a sense of history even in our (most) consumerist practices" (Chakrabarty, 59). Kiri-uu's relationship to the statist project and history is a complex one. While not involved in replicating the 'authentic' relics of Finno-Ugric culture, their work is clearly concerned to reify, and thereby authenticate, that culture. With their compact and easily transportable technology, the global scope of their appearances (in Australia, Europe, the USA) and their place within a seemingly transnational musical avant garde; Kiri-uu seem to occupy a new global cultural space. Yet while, as Said has acknowledged, there is "a new universality of migrations", "the geographical configuration of the world is still strongly inscribed"(9). In this manner, Kiri-uu's culturally encoded mode of address resonates (and resonates differently) in Australia, New York and Estonia - all locations with sizeable Estonian communities (10)- due to particular configurations of cultural territories rather than in spite of them. In this way, their international appeal can be interpreted as undermining the claims made for a new, transnational culture. Despite the highly contemporary nature of their technology and their seeming irreverence for hermetic authenticity, they are perhaps most accurately a modern manifestation of a cultural continuum rather than the heralds of any Postmodern coupure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campbell, P (1991) 'Doomed Deerhunters of the Soviet Amazon', Sydney Morning Herald 12th January 1991
Chakrabarty, D (1992) 'The Death of History ? The Historical Consciousness and the Culture of Late Capitalism', Public Culture v4 n2
Frith, S (1991) 'Anglo-America and its Discontents, Cultural Studies, v5 n3
Hockenos, P (1991) 'Shaky European Home', Australian Left Review October
Leisio, T. (1986) "Joiko Songs in Samiland", Finnish Music Quarterly n4

RECORDINGS

Kiri-uu Kiri-uu , Esoterix, 1987, album and cassette
Ingrian Evenings, Esoterix, 1993, CD only
Veljo Tormis Forgotten Peoples, ECM Records, 1992, album and CD

ENDNOTES

1 Kiri-uu publicity brochure 1992
2 Cited by Olev Muska, in interview, April 1993
3 The so-called 'Stone Age' between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras
4 Cited by Olev Muska, in interview, April 1993
5 An emphasis echoed in Veljo Tormis's assertion that "I do not use folk song, it is folk song that uses me" (cited in Kiri-uu publicity brochure 1992)
6 All quotations from the band, unless otherwise sourced, are taken from an interview with the author recorded in April 1993
7 Edward Said, in an interview entitled 'Criticism, Culture and Performance', in Marranca, B and Dasgupta, G (eds) (1991) Interculturalism and Performance, New York: PAJ Publications, 43
8 ibid, 48 9 ibid, 57-8
10 In New York, for example, audiences for their concerts were markedly cooler, perhaps expecting a more traditionally orientated performance.

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