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From The Desk Of Alasdair Roberts: Finland

Alasdair Roberts’ songs are difficult to digest. Like a large pill you can’t quite swallow, that lodges toward the back of the throat, they are dense, layered, poetic ballads coupled with a forcefully picked acoustic guitar, abrasively fragile vocals and a thick Scottish accent. His new self-titled album is not the kind of thing you put on while washing dishes. But it’s the kind of album you go back to again and again, trying to parse the lyrics, trying to understand why these songs grate at the base of your spine. Roberts will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.

Finland

Roberts: Finland is a country I’ve had the pleasure of visiting several times over the past few years, thanks to the efforts of a good friend, Niko-Matti, who lives in Turku. Niko-Matti is in a great band named Kiila, which is associated with high-quality Finnish independent label Fonal. I find Finland, on the whole, very intriguing, with its distinctive non-Indo-European language (etymologically distinct from other nearby languages such as Swedish or Russian, and distantly related to Hungarian) and the things about it that are culturally unique, such as the oral history embodied in the national epic Kalevala. There’s something about the culture that I imagine has more in common with those of places I’ve never been such as the high Siberian steppes than with western Europe—there’s a definite shamanic vibe going on. The people have the quiet self-assurance, bordering on the taciturn, of those who are channelling something very deep and ancient (or maybe they’re just a bit shy … but they are nevertheless invariably friendly). Like many Finns, Niko-Matti is a big fan of the sauna. The last time I was there in December 2014, Niko-Matti and I went “winter swimming”—that’s to say, we plunged our bodies into the cold winter sea before hurrying into the sauna, where burly Finns ladled water onto the blazing hot coals to raise the temperature to the kind of heat which could almost cause the uninitiated (such as me) to pass out. Then the process is repeated to exhaustion. I think it is a very beautiful ritual, and one that defines Finland for me.

Video after the jump.