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Kaustinen Folk Music Festival mixes old and new

Folk costumes and kantele aren't the only way to go about celebrating Finnish folk music these days. This year's Kaustinen Folk Music Festival showed that there are also new, experimental ways to celebrate the Finnish heritage.

Hermanni Turkki esiintyy.
Hermanni Turkki Iholla-salissa Kaustisella. Image: Risto Savolainen / KFMF

People may not associate light shows, modern choreography and stand up comedy with Finnish folk music, but at the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival in western Finland these and other contemporary elements are completely at home alongside more traditional acts.

Anne-Mari Kivimäki and Reetta-Kaisa Iles together form the folk duo Puhti.

"Our philosophy favours broader experimental twists over the conservative objections of folk purists," they said. "You don't have to listen to something you don't like, and it goes both ways!"

Updating time-honoured styles gets a thumbs-up from long-standing folk enthusiasts too, who say that seeing old and new music side by side is a welcome thrill.

Into the scene

This year’s programme theme at the festival was wind music. Federspel from Austria performed their unconventional and accomplished take on the Austrian wind music tradition. The Finnish Wind on Wind group joined with the Swedish team of Zephyr to present archaic Scandinavian wind music in a joint concert, and the Finnish modern folk music band Päre played rare Finnish bagpipe tunes.

Another sign of the times are acts that straddle genre definitions - performing with ease at headline events like August's Flow Festival and smaller folk music gatherings like Kaustinen.

But Kaustinen is hardly a small affair, as more than 40 thousand people attended the week-long musical bonanza.

Two members of Hermanni Turkki, a band the festival organisers called "the rising stars of folk music’s new era", say that people are the same wherever they play, clapping and cheering to the same lyrics and riffs without prejudice.

"The people we've seen are all really into the scene, no matter where we are, and that's great," musicians Joonatan Turkki and Taneli Kainulainen said.

Correction 21 July: An earlier version of this article erroneously placed Kaustinen in Jyväskylä, rather than in western Finland.