On an all-too-familiar journey to communal and familial belonging, Itkuja Suite by Rent Romus (accompanied by Heikki Koskinen, the Life’s Blood Ensemble, Heikki Laitinen) carefully considers deeply personal, interior existential ache within a geo-historical context. Finnish poetry fuses with saxophone/vibraphone/cello improvisation, swirling the past, present, and future into a beautiful and holistic outlook on what lament has to offer the human experience:
“The stories, sung by Laitinen in Finnish, are (with one exception) historical laments informed by The National Archives of Finland’s Ancient Poems of the Finnish People, with reference to the historic refugees of Finno-Ugric people across Northern Europe, and also to Romus and Koskinen’s longing for their heritage. With the benefit of translation, this offers listeners a dazzling discovery both musical and poetic, and a universal call to remembrance and healing.”
This piece is palpably a process of restoration and reparation, how the self is always in conversation with cultural belonging, and how where one comes from is deeply intertwined with identity, ancestral healing, existential survival, and resistance to cultural erasure. Lament is healing; music is medicine.
For more from Rent Romus, check out here for the outside, also released this month on Edgetone Records.
