Finnish Folk

Free-folk enclaves have seemingly sprouted overnight like so many mushroom rings. From the Bay Area to Brattleboro, Vt., each esoteric scene is filled with ever-changing band names, a cross-pollinating of members and a constant stream of rapturous (if indulgent) music made available in miniscule, handmade editions. Much like such fairy fungi, though, their above-ground appearance reveals a greater underground network beneath the loam, as a renaissance of folk music has occurred not just in the States but overseas as well. Perhaps the most highly regarded is the verdurous scene that crops up in Finland. For the non-rabid fan (or a non-native speaker), it’s hard to keep up with such unwieldy band names like Kemialliset Ystävät, Päivänsäde, Kiila and the like, much less the prodigious CDRs, cassettes and lathe-cut records that continually surface, either on private labels or on the quality Fonal label. Luckily, U.S. imprints like Eclipse and Time-Lag have taken up the cause to make this music more readily available here. Still, it is a rare treat to see a handful of these Finnish musicians on their first foray into the United States and parse their solo work and various groupings up close. For outsiders, the foreign music of Taikuri Tali, Hertta Lussu Ässä, Kemialliset Ystävät and Tomutonttu, who appear together at Radio Café Sept. 8, may still sound vaguely familiar. As much as they draw on their native roots, each of these groups also have an ear toward ’60s explorers like Don Cherry, Nico and Terry Riley. Taikuri Tali (trans.: wizard talis), a band consisting of multi-instrumentalist Antti Tolvi and a rotating cast of members, echo the open-ended sound that Cherry embraced when he left Ornette Coleman and traveled the world. Bringing together folk forms and free jazz improvisation of a spiritual bent, Cherry and his collaborators made music with bamboo flutes, rattles, prayer bowls, toys, thumb pianos and whatever objects and instruments that might have been at hand. Singer Laura Naukkarinen released Kuutarha as Lau Nau earlier this year, a solo record that offers a warmer variant on the chilly work Nico made with John Cale post-Velvets. She is also one-third of supergroup Hertta Lussu Ässä, in which Naukkarinen and her fellow Finnish femmes Islaja and Kuupuu drop their singer-songwriter sides for something more feral and unstructured. Tomutonttu is the solo project of Kemialliset main man Jan Anderzen, utilizing random cassettes and subjecting their contents to a long chain of octave and delay pedals. The time-lag accumulation of such noise emulates Riley’s hypnotic early works like “Reed Streams.” Small sounds accrue and loop, spinning like a Dream Machine stuck inside a blender, pureeing the sundry din until it’s dense and disorienting. The aural result sounds truly psychedelic, with or without the ’shrooms.