"Saivo" – an undercurrent of thought. Surging through veins. Passages flowing like a river stream into a timeless black lake. There, shapes seem to emerge – rowing with dead pace.
___________________
In the cultural world of the Finnish Sami, "Saivo" is one of the realms of the dead where the departed continue their everyday life, content and in the company of their families and forebears. "Saivo" is also the title of the new album by Tenhi that will finally see its release after four years of painstaking work at the end of November.
The album's long gestation period shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows and treasures the band's modus operandi. The Finnish musicians follow their vision mercilessly down to the smallest minutiae, which means that all of the songs have seen various arrangements and the adding of new elements until all the details of the album fit into the overall picture. On "Saivo", Tenhi use a largely consistent instrumentation to inform the tracks with cohesion and unison. Guitar and piano are the predominant instruments; at times, they are supplemented by percussion, strings, and polyphonic vocals, all in order to create a melancholic realm of sound characterised by this-worldly sorrow and other-worldly joy. The result is an album that is introverted in the truest sense of the word: just as it is believed that Saivo, the realm of the dead, may only be reached by an access under ambiguous lakes and that the journey leads to a mirror image of this world, Tenhi's "Saivo" also looks to the inner realms. Tyko Saarikko has this to say, "The biggest change from our earlier album is that the scenery and landscapes of the songs are not directly related to surrounding nature as they have been usually. In this album, the songs reflect the echoes from an inner world that surely has similarities to surrounding nature but has its own laws of nature."