"Joulupukki is a series of vignettes inspired by and dedicated to the Saami people living at the top of Fenno-Scandinavian peninsula. The only truly indigenous people of Western Europe many of whom still live the same, rhythmically seasonal nomadic lifestyle herding reindeer as their forefathers have for generations, they have a rich artistic tradition and spiritual legacy. Their land is filled with spirits and holy geography and Xambuca's extramundane electronica reflects this strangeness.

Even for rhythmic electronic music, it fits no neat category. Each track is a vigorously constructed matrix of beats, flexible but muscled and oiled up, arranged in a lattice of suggestion and ideas. In the spaces between the bell-ringing of the ten-minute "'Boazu" (reindeer), a world is bridged between modern composition, Balinese gamelan and the balletic sight of the antlered beasts trotting round and round in a brown-white blur when corralled and orchestrated by their herders.

Joulupukki also makes a connection between the most elemental Scandinavian animal husbandry and the latest in German digital technology. There is virtually no distortion in his eighty-five minutes of gleaming machine music, just clarity, crisp and uncluttered as Arctic air. Although there are echoes of traditional Saami instruments, like the shallow, tensile drum beats of "Lipeakala" and "Ivneheapmi," and evocations of the biting, horizontal wind sweeping loose snow across the alpine grazing lands, the pure, rigid synthetic-ness of his metallic sound sculptures has a strange affinity with the acres of pristine, white snow which moulds the land of Sapmi into different shapes each long winter."-Igloomag.com

This album has been reviewed on our magazine:


The Squid's Ear!