“Hey, have you heard?”

It’s been a long-running, years-long issue that Yoko Kanno has been copying themes from other artists, and the longest discussion I’ve seen about it is in YKDB (the thread has been alive for three years now!). Recently, a comparison between Angelit’s Garkit and Torukia came up, and based on the online samples, the intro to Torukia was pretty much similar to an interlude from Garkit.

So I attempted to contact Angelit, and got a reply from the composer for the song Garkit, named Kimmo Kajasto. Here is his reply to my query:

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your concern about plagiarism of the song “Garkit”.

My name is Kimmo Kajasto and I am the composer and one of the arrangers for the song. It was very interesting to hear some similarities between our song and the song “Torukia” you kindly sent us, but I did not find them so closely related that I would use the word “plagiarism”. The intro of the song bears the closest resembleance, the mood is exactly same, but when the sung melody part comes in it is at least for my taste completely different song.

I am always more concerned about the melody lines than how closely some sounds and rhythms are alike. In this case I think the similarities fall more to the later department.

Anyway, I include as attachement the whole song “Garkit” so you can poke the Yoko Kanno community if you like. Of course the accusations you pointed out should be taken seriously every time, that´s why I am very grateful you sent us a good sound exemple and let us be aware about Yoko Kanno`s song.

Some facts about Angelit. The band started their career about 25 (!) years ago as a group of three girls and they were called “Angelin Tytöt” ,translated as “The Girls From Angeli”. Angeli is a small village in the far north of Finland where the girls were born and raised. After making their first album in 1991 the group soon diminished to two girls, Ursula and Tuuni Länsman, which still are leading the group and they started continuing using guest artists to accompany their traditional singing in Sami language called joiking (bearing close similarities to the way indians from Northern America are singing). After I joined in 1995 we started to add more electronic instruments and percussions and nowadays after three more albums “Skeaikit”, “Mannu” and “Reasons” we are still together making gigs semi-permanently.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! (that´s Hyvaa Joulua ja Onnellista Uutta Vuotta in Finnish…)

Kimmo Kajasto

As a personal opinion, I would agree with him that having similar arrangements wouldn’t make a song a plagiarism of an older, similarly arranged song, because if that were the case, a lot of pop, rap and rock artists may be charged as plagiarizers. The problem with Torukia, is perhaps, the similarity of the synth melody, which is too glaring!

As in the email, I asked for a short sample of Garkit, and he sent me a full version. I verified that it didn’t have the part of Torukia that made me gape in awe after listening to it. I’m talking about the guitar and violin pause before the dramatic chorale comes in. BUT, in Garkit, a set of male vocals also joins the last verse, not in a chorale-like fashion, but with an ethnic-like feel. Before that, the acoustic guitars also become more prominent, but not in the same melody nor feel as Torukia.

Here’s a badly edited, low quality sample of Garkit, which I deliberately edited, first to avoid copyright infringement, and second to save bandwidth. I edited out the first verse, parts of the final verse, the start and the end parts. But I kept the parts which I think should be heard, which are the parts that are described above.

Garkit:

Anyone else who has contacted these artists whose work seem to appear in Kanno in altered forms?

Related Articles:

• How do you like your Turkey?
• Who Sang What in the Ragnarok 2 Concert?
• Ragnarok 2 Concert Setlist
• Yoko Kanno to perform
  Ragnarok Online 2 Concert in Korea

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Yoko Kanno Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.