root salad SANS
And why not have members living in Finland, England and Australia? Ken Hunt talks to an unconventional band.
S
ANS Live, recorded on their December 2013 tour of Flanders, includes a performance that begins with a statement of the Southern
English folksong Searching For Lambs. It acts as an instrumental overture to the traditional Finnish lament Omenankukka (Apple Blossom). The very air heaves and sighs. It is nigh-impossible to imagine anyone but SANS performing this musical nosegay with similar integrity or even in a similar way. It is hard to imagine SANS ever replicating this performance exactly because what they play is improvised and responds to the moment. They are musicians drawn to different traditions, native or other – Armenian, English, Finnish and Scottish – who found common ground in one place: in SANS’ aureoled music.
In July 2011 four loosely connected musicians met to rehearse for Finland’s Kaustinen kansanmusiikkijuhlat. They were the UK-based Armenian ‘apricot pipe’ or duduk player Tigran Aleksanyan; the UK expat, Australia-based reedman, Ian Blake; the Lytham St Annes renegade, string-and-wind multi-instrumentalist Andrew Cronshaw; and the Finnish vocal- ist Sanna Kurki-Suonio. “Because I have connections with the Kaustinen Festival,” says Cronshaw, “it seemed like a good plan to try to get them to book us as a band. We met in the wooden house where we were staying, then went on stage and did it several times over differently. Each time magic things happened.”
It was patently clear to them that they had a live one on their hands. The missing element was a name and the winning sug- gestion was SANS. Let’s speak candidly: SANS ‘explaining’ their name is like listening to people organising a piss-up at the Olvi brewery. Mention is made of a name-based acronym. It peters out after Sanna… and Aleksanyan… Cronshaw claims once to have cracked the sequence but (in)conveniently can no longer remember what it was. Com- pensating, he wibbles, “It’s what it is but it feels right.” Kurki-Suonio pipes up, “I have another band that’s quite new and not as serious [as SANS]. Its name is Sanna Kurki- Suonion Kuolematon Erikoissysteemi [Sanna Kurki-Suonio’s Immortal Special System].” Blake the Peacemaker saves the day, “It keeps things simple, doesn’t it?”
Gazing over their chequered past,
SANS’s evolution looks like some arcane board game. It truly took decades for this band to coalesce. Blake and Cronshaw pre- date (for convenience sake, let’s call it) the Pyewackett era of the 1980s. (Ian Blake: “I was working at what was then called the London Synthesiser Centre [in London’s Euston district] – back in the days when
S
synthesisers had proper knobs on, a real sort of analogue period – Andy walked in, looking for something that doubtless would make a new and intriguing noise.”) Kurki-Suonio was drawn into the Cron- shaw’s orbit when they worked together in Helsinki in early 1992 – he was produc- ing, she guesting – on Salamakannel’s Koivunrunkorakkautta. Aleksanyan and Cronshaw joined forces after Aleksanyan auditioned at an event at POSK, the Polish Social & Cultural Association centre in Chiswick in West London, where Cronshaw was judging. The disparate elements came together on Cronshaw’s The Unbroken Surface Of Snow (2011), though never all on the same track.
ANS could record in the studio but that would mean golden fetters. “In essence, it’s improvised music,” says Blake, “and I think one of the main things with SANS is that what we do is we’ll use core material from our various traditions as a kind of springboard for some pretty spacious and textural improvisations. There will be ‘core texts’ there. Sanna, for instance, has a store of texts and poems that she can call on – and in effect can either incorporate an existing melody or make something up on the spot, to which we’ll all respond. That process works for each of us. We’ll offer up some sort of theme or a few notes
strung together or a texture or a fragment of song. Things will then develop from that. What we’re doing is largely improvised, but we know we’ve got these core things which we can return to every now and again and sometimes new core things turn up.” He pauses. “It’s a bit like the Kipper Family remembering things.”
Aleksanyan amplifies this: “First of all,
each of us is feeling the others’ music very well. Sanna brings Finland’s traditions. Ian [sweetly he pronounces ‘Ian’ as ‘Jan’, also a term of endearment in Armenian] and Andrew English and Scottish and also some Finnish traditions. I have my Armeni- an traditions. The Finnish style is some- thing like the mugham [the Transcaucasian melodic form, kin to maqam and r¯
ag] style.
When Sanna sings, I am putting the mugham style together with that. We mix and put together these two styles of music. They work together really well. When Ian and Andrew join us something extraordinary happens.”
Speaking to the four members of the band, what emerges clear is that SANS is not one of those temporary here-today- gone-tomorrow aggregations. This is them in it for the long run. It is a real brand. And, as Cronshaw chirrups, “It’s the first time I’ve been in a band that had a name that wasn’t my name.”
www.cloudvalley.com/SANS.htm F 21 f
Photo: Antonia Kavas
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