Joiks, throat singing, ukouk – the »Arctic Voices« festival presents fascinating musical traditions that are sung, lived and passed down from generation to generation all around the Arctic Circle. Singers and ensembles from Scandinavia, Canada, Japan and Mongolia delve deeply into their cultures together with the audience – sometimes in traditional form, sometimes brought into the present through electronics.
In this edition of the »Elbphilharmonie Mixtape«, ByteFM host Lena Boßmann presents the festival’s diverse programme. She also talks to Sámi singer Mari Boine, who with her legendary album »Gula Gula« brought joik back onto the international stage after centuries of oppression and is now performing her new programme »Alva« at the Elbphilharmonie.
The show also explores the full spectrum of the festival: from the powerful throat singing of the Inuit – sometimes pure, sometimes experimentally combined with electronics and strings – and the trance-like canon singing ukouk of the Ainu, to Mongolian overtone singing and epic long songs from the steppe. In this way, a many-voiced soundscape of Indigenous musical cultures emerges, in which closeness to nature, spirituality and political self-assertion are directly expressed in the music.
Arctic Voices
The Arctic Circle as a unifying element: in the far north there are fascinating musical traditions that are vividly transported to the present here – from Norway to Japan, from Mongolia to the Arctic
