Kemiälliset Ystävät
Latvasta Laho
Celebrate Psi Phenomenon

My little brother is coming out to San Francisco next month for a visit from NYC. We're both pretty excited and already thinking about all the fun we're gonna have catching up. We have a lot of fun when we hang out and I wonder what kind of stories we'll be telling of this visit when it's past and part of our little family chronicle.

When we were young adults (or teenagers, in his case) he was heavy into the classical scene - playing and teaching (and writing) piano. Didn't really listen to too much of anything else. I brought home a Thelonious Monk record from college one year and just had to play it for him. It blew his mind as I expected it would. He had never heard anything like it before and was completely amazed.

'It sounds like he's playing piano with his mittens on!' I remember him exclaiming.

Well, think for a moment of all the pairs of mittens in Finland. Yeah, tons, I bet.

Call it free-folk, acid-folk, forest-folk, psych-folk or, as I like to call it, 'bucolidelica'. It all sounds like an elfin jamband without any elfin amps. Knocking over tambourines and playing the guitar on the strings above the nut. All the while singing on nitrous.

Kemialliset Ystavat is the best of the bunch. I think they live in a tree where they record these records on an old answering machine, playing their instruments in the darkness of the inner rings.

All of this of course, with their mittens on.

Copyright © 2005 Alice Kenner