WOMAD

Mari Boine

From Norway

Marie Boine certainly doesn’t regard herself as a slave to the clock-watching, bean-counting jobsworths of the music industry. There’s always a sizeable gap between her albums (“I need that time to have something real to express,” she candidly admits) and it’s this singularity of purpose that’s enabled Mari to plough her own furrow as the most celebrated Sámi singer of her generation. Originally singing in Norwegian and English, when she chose to start recordings songs in her native Sámi tongue, with it came an unconscious, almost accidental political commitment to represent her people, often disenfranchised from the mainstream of Scandinavian life. Her music is difficult to restrict to mere words, specific to the Sámi experience and yet outward-facing and not remotely insular (her favourite instrument is her African drum). And it comes adorned by a voice that’s out of time – although whether it’s from the past or the future is difficult to ascertain. As a critic once wrote of Mari’s voice, it “reveals just the smallest slice of eternity”. We can’t top that.