(Free Jazz / Avant-Garde) Jorma Tapio / Terje Isungset - Aihki - 2006, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

While the name Jorma Tapio may not be familiar to you, the name Terje Isungset sure as heck should. He's the man responsible for the Igloo record, a past record of the week, recorded entirely on instruments made from ice. We've been selling that like CRAZY, when all of a sudden we got an email from Jussi (Circle, Pharaoh Overlord, etc.) letting us know that his label Ektro was releasing a brand new record by Isungset, teamed up with some guy names Tapio. We were of course intrigued, but had no idea what to expect. And had we actually expected something, we probably never would have guessed how weird and wonderful this record would be. No ice instruments sad to say, but armed with flutes, bells, voices, kantele, percussion, Jew's harp and lots and lots of drums, these two whip up a super wild and wooly, ultra dense blast of what we can only describe as tribal forest folk free jazz. Or something like that.
Free jazz is probably the closest comparison, the first few tracks are dense psychedelic percussive freak outs, lots of splattery spastic free jazz drumming all over the place, deep bowed bass, steel string zings, and super creepy strangled and howled vocalizations. Everything sounds very primal and tribal, thick swaths of rhythmic throb underpinned by shimmering washes of cymbal sizzle and warbly mumbled melodies. Isungset proves to be a pretty bad ass drummer, whipping up some seriously wild squalls of spastic skitter, and octopoidal crash and bang. The vocals grunt and chant, sort of yodel, and hoot and holler, very festive and just a little nuts sounding. When the drums recede a bit, the band sort of wonders through some ancient forest, fluttering flutes, simple subtle percussion, distant drones. A bit reminiscent of Avarus or Anaksimandros for sure. The 20+ minute centerpiece, the track "Selainin Tuli / Sacred Fire" lets the duo spread way out, and lay out an expansive tribal soundscape, like the earlier 'free jazz' tracks but stripped way down. Hints of No Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand definitely surface now and then, the track eventually building to a howling shrieking psych drone freakout before settling back to almost complete silence. then a gentle lilting smudge of soft flutes and abstract clatter. That smeared clatter sort of drifts into the next two songs, disembodied scrapes and creaks, random bits of percussion, thick washes of low end thrum, quite dark an lovely.
The final track is a flittering flutescape, a spare landscape of woodwinds and distant shimmer, which is soon joined by a buzzing Jew's harp, and the harp and flutes get all tangled up into a strangely propulsive groove, some sort of skeletal prog laced with primal psych rock primitivism and festive Renn Faire revelry, like stumbling into some clearing in the woods and finding some strange open air market, with a very strange duo performing before a crowd of rapt onlookers. Weird, but pretty darn cool as well. Finnish music obsessives need this no matter what. Lovers of that modern free folk new weird America thing might just find that this pushes all their buttons, and REALLY REALLY open minded jazz heads might also want to give this a try.
Highly recommended!
~ Aquarius Records
Jorma Tapio is powerful, original woodwindmusician from Finland. He was first known for his contribution to the late, great, finnish composer/ drummer Edward Vesala´s Sound & Fury band which was internationally praised and made 4 CD´s to ECM. Later on he has made a career as exellent improviser and has played with many reknown musicians like: Bobby Bradford, Joseph Jarman, Conny Bauer, Andrew Cyrille, Daunik Lazro, Christian Rollet etc. Tapio had his own bands like Rolling Thunder (Live in Japan:AKETAdisk) and now KASKI with Sampo Lassila- bass and janne Tuomi- drums
Terje Isungset is known as one of the leading improvisers/percussionists in Europe. He has a very unique sound/set with big bass drum, trees, stones and bells. He has made a great career in playing with many top musicians in Europe as well as making his own music (mostly on NORCD). Terje is the first ever known to make instruments from ice and he has made CDs of ice-music!
After several years of playing together, AIHKI is their first CD out. The main starting point in this music was to play the Nature - and especially Nordic. We got inspiration of thinking about the power of Nature and also how "primitive" people (our ancestors) were related to it. It was very interesting and rewarding experience. But as both of us have (Jorma from the forest and Terje from the mountains) grown up in near nature connection- it was like going home.
~ cdbaby.com

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 12. September 2008, 21:24
Jorma Tapio & Terje Isungset / Aihki
Used drive : TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-S182M Adapter: 2 ID: 0
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Installed external ASPI interface
Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -6 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" -T "COMMENT=%e" %s -o %d
TOC of the extracted CD
Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
---------------------------------------------------------
1 | 0:00.00 | 4:09.38 | 0 | 18712
2 | 4:09.38 | 4:16.59 | 18713 | 37971
3 | 8:26.22 | 3:11.26 | 37972 | 52322
4 | 11:37.48 | 21:38.49 | 52323 | 149721
5 | 33:16.22 | 1:19.18 | 149722 | 155664
6 | 34:35.40 | 5:46.57 | 155665 | 181671
7 | 40:22.22 | 11:35.08 | 181672 | 233804
Range status and errors
Selected range
Filename C:\z\Jorma Tapio & Terje Isungset - Aihki.wav
Peak level 96.6 %
Range quality 100.0 %
Copy CRC 2CF71549
Copy OK
No errors occurred
AccurateRip summary
Track 1 not present in database
Track 2 not present in database
Track 3 not present in database
Track 4 not present in database
Track 5 not present in database
Track 6 not present in database
Track 7 not present in database
None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database
End of status report