It has been a few months since Maxida Märak released her third studio album “Anekdot”, her first in five years.
She tells SVT Sápmi that it was received well and that it is a little different from what she has done before.
– I wanted to do something different, I wanted to tell stories a little like you can tell and sing, but I wanted to do it with hip hop and rap where every single song has a name of one word, just like a song, she says and continues:
– I wanted to make a Sami album that also represents the bold, beautiful and fierce of Sápmi and not always that it needs to be night black, heavy and politically charged. It will be politics anyway, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to make a party album with a lot of history and anecdotes.
Recorded in Sápmi
The album was recorded at Märak’s home ground in Sápmi and she called the producers there to get what she wanted.
– There is a lot of work behind this album. I’ve worked with producers who aren’t from Sápmi but who were a huge part of creating the album so they got to go up to me in Sápmi and meet people and be inside that world to be able to understand what it was like we would create.
This past weekend, Maxida Märak was on site at the Book Fair in Gothenburg, where she together with the Sami artists Amoc and Áilu Valle had a conversation about the language, the struggles and the joik.
– It was super interesting, we are all from Sápmi but we work with music a little differently. It was interesting to highlight how important it is that we are in different positions where Amoc and Áilu Valle are represented the most in Sápmi, while I represent Sápmi quite a lot outside of Sápmi, which I have made an important part of my career, she says.