Vicarage of Brink and Kaustinen folk music festival 2023 - matildamotherband

13.7.2023 way to Kaustinen folkmusic festival 2023

Little bit dangerous house we are staying near city Kokkola, an old vicarage. Are you staying another night too? Pay in cash only.

Found a book by Mary Stewart on her favorite subject, the witty and very active chick, who finds herself in all kinds of tricky situations. And lo and behold always combs out a winner.

This particular chick modeled herself as a woman in a Tizian painting, voluptuous and red haired as she was and coincidentally named Gianetta. Anyway, back to present. The vicarage is a very large wooden house with a big garden. As travelers arrived all at different times in the evening, everyone kinda vanished to it’s vast amount of rooms and an attic. There was an eerie feeling that the house is actually empty. Sort of like a Agatha Christie novel and then at breakfast gradually all these couples, singles and companies arrive. Slowly a hesitant conversation starts and whereabouts are mutually exchanged. This is a course quite scarce and slow in tempo, but not in a embarrassing silence way. Actually, one could say that it grew to heated conversation considering the finnish small talk fluency.

Under the table there was a different kinda party, a very social and eager dog licking fingers laced with salty meat wurst grease. Accompanying the action was little boy Kaius bopping up and down being just the right height not quite hitting his head to the bottom of the table.

Bye bye the era of Barbie Disco - Side venues - what ´s happening on the main stage? Kaustinen folk music festival 2023

Honestness, drone, a sense of danger and a beautiful clashing of sounds; these are some of the aural delicatessen provided on the cornucopia of venues around the festival area. And of course the rhythm was the king, providing material to move the body and the mind. All kinds of traditional instruments were very well represented all around. There was this group of players demonstrating the possibilities of key violin. When all seven of them played, the richness of overtones was truly amazing in all its glory.
Then there was a duo armed with bag-pipes from Latvia blowing out a beautiful drone. Three balalaika orchestras that let the nuances play beautifully, when lowering the diminuendo down to a whisper one could hear a pin drop. Of course that kind of thing is mainly only possible in a concert situation, outdoors it would have vanished to the wind.
And all the dancing! The whirl and twirl, beautiful choreographs , story telling courting numbers accompanied by musicians who are masters of each genre. Not surprisingly though because the were reacting to the dancers at least as much as the dancers were to their accompaniment.
Everyone got a chance take apart of this massive huuto katrilli turning into this marvelous moving and breathing mass of happy faces.
So everything was very much participation, singing around the bon-fire dancing wild dervish dances. And all this is fueled by a magnificent plentitude of volunteers, keeping things rolling smoothly, people fed and safe.
Our own three performances were on the small venues except for the one in S-market which was large but audience mainly very mobile.
Still we got a couple dancing at our night gig in Sivutupa and a French flamenco guitarist came to see two our performances. On the whole there was clearly a good feeling of people paying close attention.