With a voice like no other and an omnivorous taste for jazz, folk, rock, electronica, and world music, Mari Boine’s trailblazing sound swells with shamanic beats, bold expressionism, and an earthy mysticism
Date/Time: Oct 5 2019, 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Vancouver, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts | Event calendar
Hailing from the northern tip of Norway and active since the mid-80s, Boine has collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Bugge Wesseltoft, and Jan Garbarek, while working tirelessly toward the recognition and resurgence of her Indigenous Sámi language and culture.
With guitarist Georg Buljo and drummer Gunnar Augland, Boine draws influence from hymns, Norwegian folksong, and sounds from the natural world. But it’s the tremulous, arcing Sámi yoik chants—moving from intimately ethereal and trance-inducing to the full angry power of a sonic gale wind—that are at the core of her art. This is elemental music that is not just to be heard, but to be felt. As Boine told The Guardian “we say that with a yoik, we don’t sing about a person, we sing the person. We are the feeling when we sing, we don’t describe. That’s the difference between western and Indigenous culture. When the words are limited, it helps you express something. It’s for overwhelming feelings.”
"Tremulous, ethereal and powerfully intimate, [Mari Boine’s voice] swoops and wheels over a sonic landscape, carrying images of ice floes and reindeer trails, of snowbirds flying over the Arctic tundra." - The Telegraph
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