Cutting edge
By Sergey Chernov
Staff Writer
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bad taste
Finnish duo La Sega del Canto, featuring Markus Pulkkinen and Jouni Salo, play unlikely songs on the singing saw.
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La Sega del Canto — the eccentric Finnish novelty-comedy duo that plays in St. Petersburg on Friday — was named after its main instrument, the singing saw. Reflecting the band’s sharp sense of the absurd, they also translated the name into Italian. “The idea of the band is to make people smile, to do some experiments. Tools for that are music, improvisation, comedy, theater — anything,” band member Markus Pulkkinen wrote in a recent e-mail. The saw is played by Jouni Salo, also known as J.J. Calo, who also supplies hilarious monologues in (deliberately) broken, heavy accented English, while Pulkkinen, whose stage name is Mr. Pulp, sings and plays guitar, pump organ, flute, maracas and mouth organ. The two met in 1995 in the Finnish town of Jyvaskyla, where Salo worked as an actor in the local theater and Pulkkinen studied physics, musicology and arts management. They started an improvisational theater group, with Salo as a director and Pulkkinen as a musician, before forming La Sega del Canto two years later. “At first, we tried to start a band with four saw players, but it sounded awful,” Pulkkinen recalled. “Then we decided to try as street musicians, the guitar and the saw. And it worked — the combination of sounds of saw and guitar was great. And because we had done theater, we decided to use theatrical elements in our performance. Playing in streets was great schooling for our band.” The band got its breakthrough with a street performance in the Finnish town of Pori, when they were noticed by the director of the Pori Jazz Festival, Jyrki Kangas. “He saw us in the street and said, ‘After one hour — main stage,’” said Pulkinnen. “We played two songs for 10,000 people and after us there were, for example, David Byrne and Gary Moore. After this we believed in our band — it would work.” Salo’s side-splitting monologues are partly prepared but mostly improvised. “And good improvised stories can be used again,” said Pulkinnen. La Sega del Canto’s repertoire includes unlikely versions of international pop anthems such as “We Are the World” or “My Heart Will Go On,” as well as popular classical and traditional songs. “[It’s] songs we like, songs that are possible to play on the saw,” said Pulkinnen about the band’s repertoire. “Classic songs — evergreens. But we are very lazy.” One of the band’s best-known songs is “Oravanpesa,” or “Squirrel’s Nest,” from its 2002 debut album “Das Kekkonen.” The song takes an old Finnish children’s tune and incorporates the famous sitar sequence from The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” — but instead of the sitar, La Sega del Canto plays it with, of course, the singing saw. “When we rehearsed this song for our first CD, we decided to steal a little Beatles because ‘Norwegian Wood’ has something to do with forest, and a squirrel lives in forest,” said Pulkinnen. Last year, the band released its second CD, “Songs for Games.”
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bad taste
Jouli Salo (l) and Markus Pulkkinen (r) of absurdist Finnish cabaret act La Sega del Canto.
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La Sega del Canto’s albums have included renditions of several Russian songs, such as “Iz-za Ostrova na Strezhen” (From Beyond the Island Into the Open), also known as “Stenka Razin,” and “Black Eyes” (Ochi Chyorniye). “We very much like Russian music,” Pulkkinen said. “The Finnish music tradition is very Russian — melancholic melodies are famous in Finland. A lot of Russian songs are very popular in Finland.” Apart from playing in the band, Salo continues to work as an actor in the theater, while Pulkkinen is a professional composer and producer. He is currently composing a 45-minute program for a dance troupe and is also involved with children’s theater. Immersed in his own music work, Pulkkinen does not follow the latest music trends, he confessed. “I don’t listen to music very much, because I make it for my profession,” he said. “The last CD that I bought was Tom Waits’ 3-CD box ‘Orphans.’ The radio is on in the car when we travel, and we get some ideas from there.” Rock music from Finland has become popular internationally in the past few years, and, even if it is mostly trivial pop metal, Pulkkinen sees the progress as positive. “The Finnish music business is quite young,” he said. “I am happy for those bands who have broken internationally — although they are not very good bands...,” Pulkkinen said without naming names. “International markets are growing for all kinds of Finnish music, and I think that there will be much more interesting music to come.” In St. Petersburg, La Sega del Canto will perform with drummer Kristian Voutilainen. Voutilainen is best known as a member of Elakelaiset, the band notorious for rearranging international pop hits in the style of the Finnish traditional dance music humppa. He also plays with Pulkkinen as a duo called Crap With Feeling. “Kristian Voutilainen is great musician and we met him first time when we toured together in Germany; we have the same agent there,” said Pulkkinen. “These days Kristian —actually his name is Ema Hurskainen — plays often with us. The connection with all of us is that we like the avant-garde, we like other bands and ways to make music and everything. We are good friends now.” La Sega del Canto performs at The Place on Friday. www.lasegadelcanto.net
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