Introduction
Most of us are living in an urban world, dominated by constant noise and contagious stress. Our ears are conditioned by this aggressive environment and have often lost the ability to perceive another discreet world surrounding us. It might be hidden but also swarming, vivid and incredibly musical. We are all able to prick up our ears to some birds chattering together, the wind shaking leaves, toads singing serenades or old spirits telling us their immemorial adventures…
Since its creation in 2006, Jüppala Kääpiö has tried to substantiate what they were hearing and feeling from animals, plants or even minerals that they met in their living places in different countries and during travels in different continents.
“Animalia Corolla” is a record of feasts of spirits gathered from the whole world. Their songs, dances and conversations about the synchronicity of their dreams have been transcribed in this album.
Jüppala Kääpiö is a Swiss and a Japanese duo. They settled in Brussels in Belgium in summer 2011 after staying in Switzerland , Canada, Mongolia and Japan.
The life in multicultural/lingual situations naturally gave to their music a style which might be called cosmopolitan folklore music.
Carole Kojo February 2012
❦ Version Française
✺ 日本語版
Review
The secret rites of nature, translated into music audible by humans, through the transition across unknown dimensions from the interconected worlds of plants, flowers, insects, earth, the elemental spirits that inhabit it, the waters and the croaking of frogs and the seeds that take flight, all dancing the sacred dance, the cosmic dance, proclaiming the mysterious truth of the universe: that everything, absolutely everything is alive in the unlimited flow of change.
Dreamfolk July 2012
Hitoshi Kojo and Carole Zweifel (now also Kojo) formed Jüppala Kääpiö in 2006 and after wandering together from Switzerland to Canada, Mongolia and Japan, they finally settled in Brussels, and began pursuing their vision of a “cosmopolitan folklore music.” The duo believes that living in an “aggressive” urban environment, our ears have lost their sensitivity to the “incredibly musical” natural world around us. In saying so, they are putting a twist on what Luigi Russolo, the Italian futurist, stated almost exactly one hundred years ago in his manifesto, The Art of Noises (1913), which reminded us that the countryside to which modern man flees to escape the clamour of the newly-mechanized city is in fact anything but peace and quiet. It’s just a different kind of racket which unfortunately “fails to arouse any emotion” in the desensitized urban dweller.
In their ambition to increase our consciousness to animal species and plant life by recreation and reinterpretation, the duo goes beyond ecology and multiculturalism to a kind of pluralist, genus egalitarianism that even embraces minerals. Jüppala Kääpiö have a strong affinity with the mild-mannered but freaky folk of Finland, to the point of creating a “Finnish” name for themselves. It’s a jungle inside Animala Corolla, constantly chattering birds and braying beasts with whom the duo sing (not necessarily in key), chant nonsense—or can they talk with the animals?—and grab at anything they can beat on while monkeying around with Jew’s harp, bubbly electronics, accordions, violins, kazoos, often for a very long time. It’s seriously silly music, rampantly organic, downright rococo at times, free-form and a little haphazard. It may waft like dandelion seeds on “Blooming Cocoons,” but like nature itself, its seeming randomness is its own organizing principle and it comes to dignified, lazy fruition as it closes with “Saturatus.”
Comes literally wrapped in a warm fuzzy. It says here Animala Corolla was recorded in Vevey, Switzerland, but it sounds like some fantastical botanical garden dreamt up by Dr. Seuss.
Stephen Fruitman (Igloo Magazine) October 2012
❖ Review by Jim haynes (Aquarius Records)
Jüppala Kääpiö is comprised of Hitoshi & Carole Kojo, whose lysergically bright-eyed concoctions draw from plenty of arcane and archaic folkloric traditions, and emerge as a beguiling, playful form of abstracted psychedelia.
We've mentioned before that the name of the project is in fact Finnish, translating as Juppala Dwarf. What, who, or where Juppala is, we don't really know; but the aesthetic which the couple evoke is definitely akin to those adventurous Finns responsible for Kemialliset Ystavat, Avarus, Islaja, and Kuupuu.
Bells, flutes, hand percussion, cheap synths, violins, melodicas, vocal chants, and whatnot all go into the buzzing, wheezing thickets of sound that make up Juppala Kaapio's Animalia Corolla.
With all of these instruments, the two create dense layerings of glistening textures and radiant drones that slip and slide around quite a bit, but always seem grounded in a fundamental harmonic tone that the two have plucked from the celestial spheres above.
It's easy to situate these not only near those Finns, but also Taj Mahal Travellers at their most celebratory, LaMonte Young at his trippiest, and Fursaxa at her most narcotized.
Really beautiful transcendent, modern-day ritualism!
❖ Review by Volcanic Tongue
More dazzling drone ascensions and magical duo exchanges from Japanese cosmonaut Hitoshi Kojo and Carole Kojo, recorded in Switzerland during winter 2010-2011: here the duo channel the whole Ulrich-Kaiser trip with a heady folkloric atmosphere, combining slow wordless ascensions of strings with blizzards of field recordings, massively treated globs of F/X and the kinda illuminated landscapes of the whole Mirror/Chalk/Tate axis but here given a glorious European widescreen treatment.
Think Fursaxa/Yatha Sidhra as re-worked by Nurse With Wound and you’re dreaming the right dream.
❖ Review by Onda Rock (Italian)
In fin dei conti, un po' tutto il movimento drone-folk-psichedelico diffusosi in quest'ultimo decennio sembrerebbe dedito alla rievocazione di un ritualismo primitivo, alla celebrazione dell'armonia tra la natura e un'imprecisata (ma sempre presente) entità superiore. Così, mentre i Natural Snow Buildings, incontrastati paladini del movimento, si immergono sempre più a fondo negli abissi sconfinati della galassia, c'è chi rimane ancora saldamente a terra, inebriato dallo spirito che anima le cose del mondo.
Dietro al nome del duo Jüppala Kääpiö (Hitoshi Kojo e Carole Zweifel) c'è un'autentica storia di scoperta e rivelazione attraverso il viaggio, il contatto con e tra culture diversissime idealmente unite da una sola anima. Perciò il suono di "Animalia Corolla" è ricchissimo di suggestioni e si avvale delle voci faunistiche più svariate; talmente intenso che ascoltandolo pare di disturbare qualcosa di sacro e solenne, benché i toni siano assolutamente "comunitari". È una musica che tende a calamitare tutte le forze che la circondano, a trarre energia e insegnamento da ogni cellula e a restituirli con ardente passione.
I vocalizzi ci introducono e continuano a guidarci in una tradizione che sembra avere radici antichissime, una forma di rito ancestrale simile a quello che da anni viene celebrato dalla sacerdotessa Fursaxa; solamente il breve preambolo può considerarsi in maggior contatto con la deriva cosmica del duo Ameziane/Gularte. L'immediatamente successiva "Yôkoso" è infatti una peculiare epifania musical-ornitologica, dove il vocìo degli uccelli incontra e si confonde con le nenie femminili, uniche garanti dell'origine antropica della stessa. Analogamente si può parlare di "Pollen Penetration", che come da titolo evoca una sensuale danza propiziatoria per la fecondazione dei fiori - un inno ancor più "terreno" (ma certo anche più empatico) della celebre "Sagra" stravinskijana.
A ciò segue una vera e propria parentesi "astratta" all'interno del disco, una lunga deviazione caratterizzata da inserti elettroacustici, archi di vario spessore (talvolta in reverse), tintinnii e brevi pennellate di pianoforte; gli occasionali barlumi naturalistici - bolle d'acqua, fruscii vegetali, (interse)canti spiritici - non fanno che rafforzare l'idea di una foresta impenetrabile, riproducibile soltanto per suggestioni approssimate.
Poi il ritorno tribale, la vera comunione dopo la fase iniziatica. "Ape Regina" si espande gradualmente in una cerimonia tanto stratificata quanto perfettamente orchestrata: voci, percussioni, archi e vibrazioni droniche divengono una cosa sola, sublimando in una nuova dimensione percettiva che in pochi esiterebbero a chiamare religiosa. Un sentimento di unione col Creato destinato a divenire davvero solenne nell'ultima, magistrale sinfonia drone, che si direbbe memore del misticismo professato dal nostro pioniere Giacinto Scelsi; un "Natura Renovatur" nel senso più vero del termine, che col denso attrito delle sue viole ne pare quasi una sintesi di più ampia resa prospettica, brulicante di esseri viventi e sormontata dall'enormità del cosmo.
Senza nulla togliere ai decennali fratelli maggiori, si può dire che la musica degli Jüppala Kääpiö gode, in buona sostanza, di un approccio più "integralista" - nella migliore delle accezioni possibili - tale per cui il suono sembra scaturire da un'energia selvatica, e dalla quale i musicisti si fanno dominare senza riserve. L'inedita compenetrazione, volendo anche erotica, con la realtà che celebra rende "Animalia Corolla" un'esperienza profondamente rigenerante: la musica, una volta di più, si conferma come strumento in grado di trascendere le ideologie e farsi pensiero assoluto. E il naufragare è dolce.
June 2012
Michele Palozzo (Onda Rock)
✺ 日本語論評：音薬談
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