Adjágas – Mun ja Mun
2007
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Best comments
1.“Hauntingly beautiful.”
More comments
- 2.“This track appeared on MTV2's '120 Minutes' on February 3, 2007.”
The story
Adjágas is a Sámi word for that drifting state between waking and sleeping, which is about as good a description of this band as you'll get. Lawra Somby and Sara Marielle Gaup started the group in Norway in 2004 to build songs around yoik, the old Sámi way of singing. A yoik isn't a story about a person or a place. It's meant to call up the thing itself – a memory, a feeling, a moment – so the band writes the guitars, banjo and drums around the voices instead of the other way around.
Somby grew up in Oslo skateboarding to rap, punk and reggae, and taught himself to yoik from cassette tapes after a trip to a Sámi music festival. Gaup learned from her parents in Kautokeino. Mun ja Mun comes off their self-titled debut, produced by Andreas Mjøs (Jaga Jazzist, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra), and it's one of the record's most immediate songs: the band swells as the two voices come in. The Irish Times heard Sigur Rós and Mazzy Star in it.
A Glastonbury booker caught them playing on a Norwegian mountain plateau and handed them a 2005 slot. Torrential rain kept them off the stage. Fitting, somehow, for a band named after half-sleep.
