Mari Boine
Gula Gula

The music we have always carried "inside".

Marie Boine Persen is a truly unusual and extraordinary artist. It is difficult to place her in a well-defined genre and compare her to any other artist, because few like her live in a visceral symbiosis with their land, in this case Norway, and know how to convey its scent, its carnality, and the ancestral sounds of the surrounding environment.

The lyrics she composes and sings are already in the language of the local Sami people. Her international debut is precisely this "Gula Gula", recorded in '89 for Peter Gabriel's Real World, who sensed the great expressive power of this girl, strong and determined like few others. The album, in fact, not by chance, received wide acclaim from critics and the public who, for the first time, noticed this singular singer who seemed to have fallen from another planet: what were these archaic and guttural voices that seemed to "come out of her body" rather than from her voice? What was that timeless music that more resembled ancient propitiatory and divination rites than real contemporary "music"? Indeed, Marie's particular vocality, combined with the melodic lines of her "airs", reinterprets the mythologies of a people surrounded by ice and darkness for most of the year, and it appears undoubtedly original and unique, with very few terms of comparison in the international market.

Daughter of salmon fishermen, born in a small seaside village in 1956, Marie Boine grew up with an education of extreme rigor, in the teachings of the religious community of the "Christian Pietists", and it is precisely there that she will take her first steps by specializing in the psalm singing of the Laestadian, very popular among the Sami people of Norway. Marie's music, skillfully merges the ancient black spirituals with traditional Sami joik, contaminating them with Christian Gregorian chants, and blending it all with "insertions" of contemporary music such as jazz, rock, and music from other popular cultures such as the Native American, Arab, and African (especially in the tribal use of percussion) lending her distinctive voice to saxophonist Jan Garbarek, alongside whom she recorded the most recent album for ECM, Twelve Moons.

"Gut-wrenching" music, as mentioned, played with a skillful use of "low" tones that manage to shake and make the "intestines" and lower abdomen vibrate, seducing the body to externalize the most primitive and instinctive part of each of us. "Almost" therapeutic music in its shamanic and, dare I say, "sacred" evocation: music supported by few notes, few tonal variations as if nothing more were needed to underscore the evocative beauty of these 8 mantra-tracks of disconcerting poetry that cannot be placed in any genre, no place, no time, as if, in reality, they belonged and have been "public domain since always" and surfaced from the most remote part of the Human Being since the dawn of time.

Music that makes us say "it seems like I've heard it before, as if it has always been MINE, from even before I was born or reincarnated in this life". Bau Bye.