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Tribulations d'une Française en Finlande
14 avril 2008

Värttinä @ Pakkahuone, Tampere, April 12th

A week since all schedules crashed down and I'm collapsing too, barely able to stand up for more than a couple of hours so physically and emotionally drained I am these days. Not even this feeling to sleep avidly, to thrust oneself into the sheerest rest, only these monuments of exhaustion weighting on my shoulders and prompting me to dread a sudden faint, any place and anytime. My own nature of night owl is even deeply disturbed by the rushed dawns - I'm strangely yearning for those past times of darkness in which I step back for a shelter. Though not disturbed that much. Time is flying, these days, faster than ever, faster than I would have even wished, and I wonder how come that with all this free times in hands I have finally none. Claws trying to grip on the present time and recent past without being even able to seize anything - this might be the precise reason why the insufferable delay has become overlaid with tight deadlines. I spend my time wondering what I should play, as what I'm playing passes in the blink of an eye. And, lastly, that might be, these exploded schedules and time distortion, and earlier dawns altogether, the reason why I ended up watching the sky clearing over the snowy roofs, as strange as it can sound, in a grey Sunday morning, and with the imperious incapacity to go to sleep.

My intense lobbying to get people to the Värttinä show for the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the band did not prove very effective, due to this trend of ten-line writing/reading I try to fight against (not much of a success, obviously). Markus was on the go as always, Coline in spite of her weak condition really wanted to come; we ended up all three at Pakkahuone, after a fair couple of drinks on the way, discussions about Scandinavian/Nordic folk music and having listened to some tracks of Hedningarna, Gjallahorn and of course Värttinä . I had discovered, or most likely paid attention to Värttinä's music in the early days of my stay in Finland: the song Seelinnikoi was used as soundtrack of the The Field performance by the Australian acrobats of Strange Fruit, during the 2007 Night of the Arts in Helsinki. Back then, the strongly impressive vision of those bodies swinging in top of poles, coupled with the deafened and perhaps slowed down echoes of this choral song in the middle of an absurd night of overcrowded streets, lasted in my mind for days. I just seized the occasion to see them play when I heard they'd be playing in Tampere. The tickets were expensive to say the least, thus wasn't I too surprised, unlike maybe Markus, to enter in a room filled with seats, and with a delimited area around the bar beyond whose boundaries we couldn't bring our drinks. The audience was, in my own terms, very posh, and my Finnish friend was somehow shocked of all the ties and suits and of the visible existence of a sort of folk music elite, some famous poet chatting around it seems. Likewise were we (but this time along with a significant part of the ties and suits around) outraged by the behaviour of some groups of people around tables in the Do-Not-Bring-Your-Drinks-Out area, loudly chatting over the beginning of the concert. It was all very strange - folk music elite, audience coming to show themselves? Folk music? I hastily emptied my goblet of beer and we moved at last closer from the stage, avoiding the rows of seats to lean our backs against the wall.

V_rttin__r_duites_012

V_rttin__r_duites_002        V_rttin__r_duites_007        V_rttin__r_duites_001

V_rttin__r_duites_004        V_rttin__r_duites_003        V_rttin__r_duites_010        V_rttin__r_duites_006

V_rttin__r_duites_013        V_rttin__r_duites_009        V_rttin__r_duites_011        V_rttin__r_duites_005

It is not that frequent to live moments of genuine musical pleasure, regardless of the somewhat kitsch costumes and scenery - which I did not personally mind at all - and regardless of the general conditions, the posh seated audience and the price of the tickets. This concert was one - what else to expect from a 25-years old band of professional musicians and singers? Yes, one could expect an artificial show running on the routine mastery of too often played pieces. Which was the contrary there. Or how to instil soul in whatever you sing.


As indicated on the programme, the last song was Seelinnikoi, for which the three singers prompted the audience to get up and dance. Why so late? As we had discovered the layout of the room before the concert, the idea to show us more drunk than actually and to go dancing in the very front of the stage and in the middle row sprung to my mind - some aping of what had happened, even before I left for Finland, with some slightly inebriated people from some label during the set of D.V. at the April 2007 Nuit & Brouillard Festival.
More accurately, and while I observed people jiggling and dancing during Seelinnikoi, only because they had been asked to do so by the band itself, a perhaps more accurate example came to my mind, on a strange coincidence, from the very same Night of the Arts. In the very posh and high-class tent build for the Helsinki Festival, I had seen Mercan Dede, Turkish electro-folk artist, accompanied by a dervish performance by Mira Burke - a stunning whirl of twenty minutes after which she fell overwhelmed in the arms of her fellow artists on stage. I recall women in the audience unable to remain seated, and leaving hastily the rows, rushing to the sides just to dance, and dancing, dancing, exhilarated. No authorization of the artists, the same type of audience - so what? This shouldn't be like that. Music and especially this kind of music should be a stroke inside one's chest, and imperious impossibility to remain still. This is all about that.

V_rttin__r_duites_008

Five minutes after the concert ended, the staff there began to dismantle all material. Coline and I made the girls sign our programs, while Markus was filling a feedback form about the concert (sic) - quite surreal. It was not even nine, and as further touch of nonsense, not even dark. I suggested to make a picnic, and we got some food in a shop about to close, walked to the city centre and settled down on a bench down next to the rapids. The conversation was weirdly running about interpersonal violence statistics in Nordic countries... Spur of the moment, we went to the Kivi café next to the Theater, where I've been drinking a very nice Get27 hot chocolate, rushed to get the bus, missed it, spent twenty minutes in the total opposite of the Kivi café - Vanha Monttu, full of metalheads and with a jukebox, which seems to be a conventional feature of metal and rock bars in this country - brought, still further in nonsense, Markus with us to the Kaukajärvi area, although he lives five minutes away from the bar we were in.
In our buildings parties were taking place in all common rooms, and it looked like no one was sleeping. We intruded in an Italian birthday, freaked out Olga through the window and brought her with us. The atmosphere was very strange and slightly intoxicated. Back to our own residence, Markus came to help me carrying the leftover beers to Coline's place. It took much more time than expected, and I was puzzled by the striking similarities and proximities he had with my favourite Finnish ritual ambient projects as he fell upon the cover of the r.A.S.H.n.k.a-RA LP, and as I explained to him the little I knew about it. The conversation drifted towards paganism, which shouldn't be that surprising for someone so fond of Finnish and Nordic legends, traditions and folklore... And we all ended up in my room, Coline having been kicked out of her flat by her own flatmate, Markus inebriated lighting all candles he fell upon, all of us talking of welfare state and authoritarianism, listening to out-of-date pop music and finally watching clips from the Monty Python's Meaning of Life - the last one was Death. At three we had stuck our noses to the window - after a day of wonderful weather, it was snowing, again.

Markus had forgotten his jacket in Coline's flat, and left at five under the snow and with a mere scarf around his neck, watched over by a mothering Olga. There were cans and glasses all around my room, the laptop open and a tender tone of purple and blue colouring the snowflakes - and this unspoken impossibility to go to sleep. The state of emergency was back again, caught between my decreasing strength and the increasing light. One hour passed before I surrendered.

This morning, again stunned by how time had been conjured away and myself repelled by the grey-blue light, lying in bed before sleeping, I got this feeling coming when waking up, a split second to recall in what bedroom you fell asleep the previous evening, and what is the position of the bed in the room in regard of the door and the window. I've been a bit dizzy and heard the birds singing from another point than the actual one; it was the same song I could hear from my bed, in the spring summer mornings, from my room in the house I grew up in. All was so simple back then, in the black box of my bedroom, in a smaller world furnished with familiar elements recognizable only by touching them, in the dark; looks bigger in this vision than how I found it lately. No love, no longing and no absence, no perspectives and no unknown land wider than everything which one can intuitively perceive behind and beyond, no choices and no responsibility. There couldn't have been any easier path. I am so tired that I feel like unravelling; my claws only grip on void while blindly searching a safety wire... which does not exist.

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