- You can put any kind of sound in house music, apparently. Recently we’ve had Balkan trumpet troupes (‘Fizhauer Zieheuer’), Maxwell Smart orchestral harumphs (Sebbo’s ‘Beirut Boogie’) and even someone making ‘O’ shapes with his mouth while flicking his throat (‘Deep Throat’ – VonStroke, go to the principal’s office. Now.) And people still dance. Indeed, it’s the frisson of hearing all these unusual noises shoehorned into the house template that makes the genre exciting. This time the shock of the new is a bit more anthropological. As you shake to ‘Voui Voui Mu’ in the club (assuming DJs are game enough to play it), part of you will be pondering: What language is this woman singing in? Turkish? Ethiopian? Let me spoil the mystery. Turns out Mari Boine is Sami, which is an ethnic minority from the north of Scandinavia (I googled).
Yet the track is not just a Berlitz lesson: the purity of Boine’s voice is such that she could be singing about de-hoofing reindeers and it’d make the tears squirt. Okay, she does go on a bit (she was trained as a vocal jazz singer), a factor which might not lend this to repeated listens, but chances are you’ve never heard anything like Mari Boine’s voice in your life.
Oh, and Henrik? The Berlin deep house specialist has a remix discography that reaches out beyond the usual suspects into Mind Your Language territory anyway (Kahil El'Zabar, Wei Chi, Kuniyuki) so his choice of material is no huge surprise, but he really pulls out the stops here with ten minutes of churning and riffing house that peaks and troughs like the bow of a Viking ship. But the question is: does it all hang together? Scandinavian wailing versus East Berlin deep house? My verdict is that the sum product is really something very special. Everyone I’ve played it to screws up their face and disagrees, but what would they know? Ignorant of the way of the Sami the lot of them. And the way of the Henrik, too.
The remix on the B-side by Kohib is more respectfully ‘world music’ than otherworldly (Warning: contains Earth mother chanting) so it’s not as intriguing.
This is a beautiful, sad house record.
TracklistA Voui Voui Mu (Henrik Schwarz Remix)
B The Shadow (Kohib Remix)