IANAI: Lord Of His World
World music is a misnomer. The concept is no older than the 1960s, where it was used to delimit Western pop and folk music from just about everything else, and nowadays it tends to reek of that post-Colonial ‘othering’. It actually describes two quite different approaches to making music: sustaining and celebrating traditional (and often ancient) forms of music, or reinventing lost music with whichever instruments have survived, and IANAI puts an interesting twist on both approaches.
IANAI is not the music of a lost world but the music of a world that never existed; at least, not outside the mind of its creator Jaani Peuhu. “I’ve always hated world music!” Declares Peuhu. “Well, maybe not DEAD CAN DANCE,” he adds. The musician, producer and songwriter resides in Helsinki, and you’ll hear his talents feature on records from SWALLOW THE SUN, MERCURY CIRCLE and ICONCRASH. “My dad is a professional musician, and he was always playing me world music growing up,” remembers Peuhu. “I found it interesting but, at the same time, I’m really into big melodies and choruses and so on.”
While Peuhu already had an eponymous solo project underway, he felt compelled to pursue something else entirely, which five years later has culminated in IANAI’s debut Sunir. “I just started having fun, and began creating something really weird. I wasn’t thinking about it at all, it just started happening. It was fascinating, because I felt total freedom. I had started creating a world of my own.” The main character in Peuhu’s world is Trevenial, who speaks to this world through IANAI, and although their nature is ambiguous, their portrait graces the cover of Sunir. As Peuhu himself puts it. “IANAI is like the mothership, and Trevenial is the singer. It’s the character that I need to do this, to channel the music and the language.” He continues, “this world I’ve created: I really need to believe in that to create this music, otherwise it wouldn’t feel and sound honest. I have to dive deep into it. Trevenial and the other characters are a gateway for that.”
While IANAI, and the world and characters which the project channels, are Peuhu’s work alone, he could not have realised an album as musically rich and complex as Sunir without having brought on a whole cast of collaborators. To namedrop but a few, members of MASSIVE ATTACK, H.I.M., and THE SISTERS OF MERCY have lent their considerable talents to the project, and so what you hear on Sunir is a nascent project birthed by experienced hands. “There are like fifty musicians working on the album, I think,” nods Peuhu. “I didn’t want to use MIDI at all, I wanted to use only real instruments. It was a lot of work to hunt down musicians all over the world who can play weird instruments,” he grins, “but everything you hear on the album is played by a real musician.”
So while the music of IANAI is (literally) otherwordly, the instruments on which it is performed are international. “I wanted to make this music truly global,” confirms Peuhu. “I didn’t want it to sound distinctly Finnish, so there’s sounds and influences from all over the world. That’s the way that I see spiritualism, too,” he continues. “No one is right, no one culture has it right – no one knows anything! I’m happy that we try to learn something while we are here on Earth and this is music for that.”
We pick back up on the spiritual dimension of IANAI, curious to hear more. “That’s the key element in all of this,” confirms Peuhu, “I’ve always been a very spiritual person, but I’m pretty anti-religious too. I don’t like religion, but I’ve been studying them, as well as occultism, spirituality and so on. I’m just trying to put them all together and introduce that world to everyone,” he smiles. “I feel that we should all create our own religion, which is why I’m hesitant about talking about my own beliefs in detail.”
“About the album,” he continues, “one of the most important stories behind it was inspired by the old testament, and the story about the nephilim. When the angels came to earth, and had children with human mothers, their children were nephilims, or giants as we would call them. God got pissed off and killed everyone. I looked around at different cultures’ stories, and you find this same story everywhere.”
We finish our discussion talking about Peuhu’s ambitions for IANAI following the success of Sunir. “I know where I’m going with this,” he insists. “I have a long-ass plan. We’re working on a book and everything. I have all the stories there, and these songs are about the stories.” [What about a tour? Surely it’s impossible to take fifty musicians out with you on the road!] “Actually we’re planning that already,” he laughs. “Although it certainly won’t be all fifty. Just arranging this kind of music for a live band is a true challenge! I’m looking at different options, and finding multi instrumentalists to tour with so we can bring as many of these sounds to life. We basically have the band together already,” he adds. “I’m working on the second album at the same time as well, so the live set will already be a combination of the first and second album, even if it isn’t released yet.”
Sunir is out now via Svart Records.
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