EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 10 - Samoyedic Folk Music

Genre of the Day - Samoyedic Folk Music

Album of the Day - Самодеятельное искусство народностей севера (Samoyedic Folk Art) by Various Artists (1983)

May 10, 2024

Samoyedic peoples blessed us with one of the cutest dog breeds on the planet. Today, they also give us one of the most dynamic albums I’ve heard in this column.

Despite that iconic name, the actual composition of the Samoyedic peoples is a bit more nuanced. Samoyed simply derives from a pejorative Russian term used to describe all of the indigenous peoples of the northern lands, with the largest subgroup being the Nenets people. They even have their own autonomous okrug, something of a tribal nation in Russia. In the harshness and lack of easy livability in Siberia, they’ve survived off of subsistence hunting and reindeer herding for hundreds of years. They’ve been aided by those majestic dogs (I really, really, want a Samoyed; couple that with a deep-rooted desire to live in a warm place and you’ve got a lifelong unsettling tension). 

Don’t mistake their migratory nature for an Amish-like inability to embrace new technologies: when snowmobiles dropped in the 1990s, they made quick use of them to decimate the local wolf population that threatened their reindeer hunting. They probably rejoiced as they zoomed through the tundra after having survived the USSR collectivist push that sought to uproot their nomadic ways.

As we saw with yesterday’s genre derived from the victory dances of fearsome Brazilian bandits, unique ways of life that hinge on constantly migrating often give rise to distinctive forms of music. You have to stay innovative on the road to meet the changing conditions, and music is one of the best ways you can occupy yourself on the move. In addition, their music carries an extra spiritual flair caused by the integral influence of their shamanistic religious practices. 

Samoyedic songs vary quite a bit in purpose, sound, and instrumentation, and there’s a dearth of information out there. I can only imagine how much Russian research exists (the Soviet era was pretty good for cultural anthropology), but I fear I’m only partly a Slavic doll. I did find one English paper that argues that the Nenets’ people’s songs fall into three categories: epic, lyrical, and shamanistic. Epic songs are narratives that focus on stories accepted as true and that chronicle the history and lives of the Nenets people. There’s a profusion of songs about man-eating giants slain by triumphant heroes. As the Nenets’ social structures have shifted from clans to the family level, the struggles illustrated in the songs have evolved from topics such as battles to more individual-level struggles—a fascinating exercise in how the songs we consume today are affected by the family structure of our particular society. Thus, there’s also individual songs called syo.

We could endlessly get into the weeds (or the snow of the tundra first, then the weeds), and I really do thank the ethnomusicologists who study this so deeply. I have to say, listening to this album blind was a wonderful, unique experience. The sounds are deeply unfamiliar—there’s the deep, reverberating instrument that with much research I came to find out comes from a type of jaw harp on the third track, that then makes way for anxious strings and pattering drumming. The fourth track trades the intensity of instrumentation for visceral, breathy throat singing. The repetition of the male’s throat melody riff allows for the assertions of his female counterpart to float above his anchor. Many songs clock in at one minute, and the vast range of featured artists ensures you’ll never know what’s coming next. A pared back solo male song is immediately followed by the striking, dissonant horn chorus of “Наигрыш На Кяункиэ (Удэгейская мелодия).” Alongside these samplings of raw, traditional sounds are tracks like the bouncing “Хэдьэ (Эвенская танцевальная мелодия)” which feels indiscernible from a late ‘60s band on the precipice of dabbling in psych rock, and instrumentation you could find anywhere in Russia like the mandolin and accordion of the penultimate track. It’s an ambitious display of the depth of musical passion present in Samoyedic cultures, and in the will to survive in a particularly inhospitable climate. It’s a testament of the human need to tell and spread stories even as we move against snowy gusts.