Wednesday 2 November 2011

Mimmit



Tanssi Poika - translation

Check out EviEvone's YouTube channel for examples of tracks by Mimmit ("Chicks"), a double act comprising the sisters Pauliina Lerche and Hannamari Luukkanen, who come from the village of Rääkkylä in Eastern Finland near the Russian border.

Their target audience is actually children ...

The Mimmit band is an exciting mix of danceable world music and animation!

A new and refreshing take on Finno-Karelian world music for children and the young-at-heart with mythological undertones!

Mimmit has a big mission: They want to make children fall in love with world and ethnic music before they get too suspicious about "alternative" music styles!

... but this seems an irrelevant genre classification for this exuberant and refreshing folk-fusion music, some of it quite dark and mystical, such as Tanssi Poika ("Dance, boy"), Pakkasherra (the Finnish equivalent of "Jack Frost", I think) and Hauen sanalla ("The Word according to Magical Pike").

See the official Mimmit website for samples and background; there is an English page. Pauliina Lerche has also done solo work, which I've mentioned before. See her official website for track listings and samples. Other tracks are on YouTube including the brilliant accordion piece Tulikatriili ("Fire Quadrille")

- Ray

2 comments:

  1. Finnish (more so than, for example Swedish) usually looks very alien, with few obvious ways in to start decoding it.

    So,I was pathetically grateful to spot "tanssi" with its promise of links to "tanze" and "dance"! :-)

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  2. It certainly looks like a (rare for Finnish) cognate, but you never know ... Finnish has quite a lot of false cognates and "false friends".

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