Little bit dangerous house we are staying near city Kokkola, an old vicarage. Are you staying another night too? Pay in cash only.
Found a book by Mary Stewart on her favorite subject, the witty and very active chick, who finds herself in all kinds of tricky situations. And lo and behold always combs out a winner.
Under the table there was a different kinda party, a very social and eager dog licking fingers laced with salty meat wurst grease. Accompanying the action was little boy Kaius bopping up and down being just the right height not quite hitting his head to the bottom of the table.
This was the place, where we stayed during Kaustinen folk music festival 2023.
Honestness, drone, a sense of danger and a beautiful clashing of sounds; these are some of the aural delicatessen provided on the cornucopia of venues around the festival area. And of course the rhythm was the king, providing material to move the body and the mind. All kinds of traditional instruments were very well represented all around. There was this group of players demonstrating the possibilities of key violin. When all seven of them played, the richness of overtones was truly amazing in all its glory.
Then there was a duo armed with bag-pipes from Latvia blowing out a beautiful drone. Three balalaika orchestras that let the nuances play beautifully, when lowering the diminuendo down to a whisper one could hear a pin drop. Of course that kind of thing is mainly only possible in a concert situation, outdoors it would have vanished to the wind.
And all the dancing! The whirl and twirl, beautiful choreographs , story telling courting numbers accompanied by musicians who are masters of each genre. Not surprisingly though because the were reacting to the dancers at least as much as the dancers were to their accompaniment.
Everyone got a chance take apart of this massive huuto katrilli turning into this marvelous moving and breathing mass of happy faces.
So everything was very much participation, singing around the bon-fire dancing wild dervish dances. And all this is fueled by a magnificent plentitude of volunteers, keeping things rolling smoothly, people fed and safe.
Our own three performances were on the small venues except for the one in S-market which was large but audience mainly very mobile.
Still we got a couple dancing at our night gig in Sivutupa and a French flamenco guitarist came to see two our performances. On the whole there was clearly a good feeling of people paying close attention.
We participated as a players to Kaustinen folk music festival 2023. It has been ogranized since 1968 and relies partly on voluntary work.
We visited Tampere 12.8.2023 and performed at Laikun lava and this time we payed for mixing and mastering our gig. We got a recorded tape of the gig and published it in bandcamp.
For the first time, almost at the beginning of the story of the Matilda Mother band, we had a gig in Tampere’s off program. We had two gigs on different days. We did it with two acoustic guitars. We didn’t have a technician or a mixer with us, the acoustic guitars had external microphones that didn’t hold properly. We performed songs in Finnish and English, and at the same time there was starting a gig of Rammstein at stadion of Ratina.