Mari Kalkun: Stories of Stonia album review — mythical Estonian folk

Receive free Albums updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Albums news every morning.

“Oh, it was boring to live there/With naught but bare land to see/Land so even and flat,” Mari Kalkun sings in “Munamae Loomine” against an empty background, the occasional twirl of a sauna whisk and an electronic susurration. The backing shifts key, develops hills and valleys. Kalkun meets a wagtail, a goose gives her three eggs and all of them grow into mountains — the first into Munamagi, the Baltics’ highest point.

We are in Vorumaa, south-east Estonia. Kalkun champions the region’s folk music and its language, Voro, now down to its last 75,000 speakers. Stories of Stonia, her seventh album, is produced by the British song collector Sam Lee, and it has the wow and flutter, the awe at thin places, that characterises his best work.

We hear of the Milky Way and the flight of the swifts. A whole country is sung into being. “Suur Tamm” remembers an oak so large it blotted out the sun; a small boy with a magic axe cuts it down and makes it into a house, a barrel, a coffin, a sauna. The bounce of “Maaima” recalls Lee’s Old Wow as the words urge the Earth to fight back against humanity.

Kalkun wraps the album’s prettiest melody around “Toistmuudu”. With calls and responses about resilience and silence, it takes its lyrics from verse by the poet and ecologist Jaan Kaplinski, who died in 2021. There is another creation myth in “Kui Kivid Olid Veel Pehmed”, about the time when the stones were still soft. The singing chirrups and Norwegian tuba and trumpet player Daniel Herskedal adds clouds of brass to Hasso Krull’s words. “The trumpet into bagpipes/The tin whistle into a saxophone/ I sang books into birds/And TVs into fish,” Kalkun sings. Folkloric ghosts weave in and out of “Mu Vallakoolomise Paal Kiil”, a poem by Triinu Laan that laments the moribund language of Voro, even as Kalkun breathes it back into life.

★★★★★

‘Stories of Stonia’ is released by Real World