#kantele

[diemelusine]

The Finnish folk musician Kreeta Haapasalo plays the kantele in a peasant cottage (1869) by Robert Wilhelm Ekman. Ateneum, Helsinki.

[tuulikannel]

Look look look what @lazytoufu made me! Little Shuu with a kantele! I love this so much, he's absolutely perfect! Just look at the little cutie in his traditional clothes and all!

💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

eta: If you want a cute chibi of your own, check out her blog! Commissions are open now ^^

[kmmarttila]

Midsummer meadow

[fhgachaforgaza]

The pinecone pig brought you…

Ragnvaldr crafting a kantele out of the salmonsnake's jawbone

[i-havenothingelsetopost]

Mulla on viiskielinen kantele. Mitä muuta tällä voi soittaa kuin Ukko Nooan ja Säkkijärven polkan?

[puuta-heinaa]

Visit Original Link

Being delulu about not liking EW, as now I have apparently also made kannel cover of it. I haven't touched kantele in 25 years, but this was great motivation and a nice 30 minutes project.

It's slightly easier on the ears than flute version I promise, but unfortunately not as unhinged. I first followed only the singing melody, then changed everything when I listened to how they actually play in the background.

Oh and it's not sung, just played, for those familiar with Finnish lament tradition.

[torillatavataan]

Ulla Katajavuori was a Finnish musician who played the traditional Finnish kantele, performing from the 1930s to the 1990s. She played the modern, multi-stringed version of the kantele, and was considered a virtuoso and maintainer of the tradition, especially during the 1960s when the instrument was of low popularity.

[mywifeleftme]

255: Amorphis // Elegy

Elegy Amorphis 1996, Spinefarm

A woman I was sleeping with once asked me while we were lying in bed in the darkness if there was any poetry I could recite from memory. Reader, I had nothing, so I ended up sleepily intoning these words:

Truly they lie, they talk utter nonsense. Those who sing music Reckon that the kantele Was fashioned by a god Out of a great pike’s shoulders, From a water dog’s hooked bones… It was molded from sorrow. Its belly out of hard days, Its soundboard from endless woes, Its strings gathered from torments And its pegs from other ills. Truly they lie, they talk utter nonsense.

Then she wept. I’d mentioned the words came from the Kanteletar, a Finnish collection of traditional folk poems collected in 1840, but I wonder if the reaction might’ve been different if I’d gone on to say that I’d learnt them from “My Kantele,” a song from idiosyncratic death metal band Amorphis’s third album Elegy. (Possibly not; she was the sensitive type.)

Amorphis is probably my favourite metal band of the ‘90s, moving over the course of four albums and a coupla EPs from a hoarse death-doom croak to an uncategorizable psychedelic smear of folk, prog, melodic death, and goth rock. Their adolescent fascination with fantasy warfare led them to the deeper well of folklore in all its silliness and strange wisdom; they infused their wintry stomp with the druggy Orientalist prog rave-ups of fellow Finns Kingston Wall. It always seemed like those moments when they found themselves in the zeitgeist were not the result of chasing trends but a happy accident of their own path briefly intersecting the moment, as when Elegy’s bold embrace of keyboards and alternating clean and growled vocals anticipated the Gothenburg melodic death sound that was about to take over the extreme metal scene.

Elegy crunches (“Against Widows”) and Elegy thrashes (“On Rich and Poor”), but mostly it swirls, with new addition Kim Rantala's watery keys and lead guitarist Esa Holopainen’s increasingly Floydian selection of tones lapping over the album’s burly architecture. The selected Kanteletar poems that serve as lyrics tend toward mournfulness, and both growler Tomi Koivusaari and debuting clean vocalist Pasi Koskinen give appropriately panged readings, but as with a lot of genuine folk songs most of the musical settings have a playful zest. It’s an album rife with lengthy, dramatic outros (“The Orphan,” “Weeper on the Shore,” “Elegy”), the band finding a stirring melody and riding it to satisfaction, and if their sudden fascination with Eastern scales and the sitar is geographically inexplicable (why not a kantele on a song called “My Kantele”?) the songs that go that way generally rip.

There’s a fair amount of cheese to be found on Elegy, but even nearly 20 years since I first heard it as a teen, I find I’m able to take most of it in the spirit it was intended. Elegy’s still kind of way out there on its own as metal goes, doing its magic on a frozen stream that sparkles under the stars.

255/365