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November 2024 #33 - Top 40 for Nordic & Baltic Influence Piika Kaarin (track)
October 2024 #33 - Top 40 for Nordic & Baltic Influence Piika Kaarin (track)
September 2024 #33 - Top 40 for Nordic & Baltic Influence Piika Kaarin (track)
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1 time in the Global Top 40
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ABOUT
The adventurous and visionary Finnish folk musician and jouhikko (bowed lyre) player Pekko Käppi’s fourth album Sanguis Meus, Mama! will see the day and night light in March 2015.

Compared to Käppi’s previous albums, Sanguis Meus, Mama! has a more straightforward sound and even has a distinct odor of pop, layered with colliding rhythms and psychedelic, yet sweetly dangerous, sounds from the Finnish summer swamps with hidden secrets from the past. Traditional lyrics and harshly joyous jouhikko playing butt heads with drones from Moog's Taurus synth and other electrified things. Also, for the first time in his recording career, he has recorded with a band of his own: they go by the name PEKKO KÄPPI & K:H:H:L (Bones of the Crazy Dead Horses).

Thematically, the album is dealing with traditional Finnish magic. Finnish “voodoo,” was generally very paranoid. One had to stay alert and be prepared with complicated magical rituals in order to protect oneself from the surrounding evil eyes of your neighbors and at the same time jinx their good luck in fishing, hunting, growing crops, etc. This controversial situation has produced thousands of lines of aesthetically beautiful but wild and even psychedelic magic poetry. In the stories of Sanguis Meus, Mama! there is a central character, a maid called Kaarin (also starring in the video single Mun Vereni – Blood of Mine) who is adventurous in the realms of magic, love, and death.

As a singer and a researcher, Pekko Käppi is well-versed in the Finnish runo-singing tradition among the older layers of Finnish folk songs. His debut album Jos ken pahoin uneksii was released in 2007 and nominated for the Finnish ethno-Grammy award. The second full-length album Vuonna '86 was released in February 2010 and received the Folk Music Album of the Year award in Finland. His third album Rammat Jumalat (Lame Gods) also received very good critical appraisal. Käppi has a strong ethnomusical approach in his work and has worked with various artists across the different genres of music from around the world.

Pekko Käppi & K:H:H:L performed at the 2013 Womex World Music Festival in Cardiff. The next international appearances in 2015 after their extensive record release tour of Finland will be at the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Netherlands, and at the Garden of Sound Festival in Wroclaw, Poland.

Pekko Käppi & K:H:H:L line-up:

Pekko Käppi: jouhikkos, vocals

Tommi Laine: cigar box guitars, vocals, percussion

Nuutti Vapaavuori: cigar box bass, vocals
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