On My Mouth Sang / My Heart Sank, Olev Muska approaches Veljo Tormis’ arrangements of Finno-Ugric folk songs as a kind of personal excavation, less a performance than a slow unearthing of material with which the artist connects. The songs feel like a private dialogue with ancestry, where fragments of tradition are handled like artefacts; turned over, disassembled, and carefully reconfigured.
Opener “Jah Jah | Yes! Yes!” introduces the sounds of pitched-up, heavily treated vocal samples that recur throughout the album. “Lii Lee Ja Rockabilly | Lii Lee And Rockabilly” is a psychedlically rhythmic concotion of beats and sound, and sounds like a nightmarish child’s TV show theme with twisted voices singing over deranged percussion. “Röntyska II | A Dance Song II” allows more traditional structures to survive, a piqued male voices rattling off something incomprehensibel to those unfamiliar with the tongue, but still as hypnotic as likely intended.
Rather than presenting the past as fixed, Muska treats it as permeable and unresolved, allowing traces of older worlds to surface in unfamiliar forms, suspended between historical distance and a deeply internal, searching presence. This exploratory aspect is more investigated on the title track “Suu Lauloi, Süän Murehti | My Mouth Sang, My Heart Sank”, which happens to be the longest song on the record. Sober organs are warped by technology with precision. Cascading ambient tones merge with folk singing to create a mystical environment for the listener, bringing them deeper with its relentless drones and incessant chants. The music, through its playful experimentation and meditative qualities, acts as a thin fluorescent veil which makes the world feel serious yet colourful.
What emerges throughout the collection is not a straightforward preservation of folk material but a layered reconstruction, shaped by decades of fascination that began with early sampling experiments in the 1990s. The textures suggest something weathered yet newly exposed, as if cultural memory were being filtered through circuitry and intuition simultaneously.
★★★★