Kaislikossa luita
2021
- Maan aliset
- Syvänteissä
- Luukori
- Luppo ja sippi
- Joenvartiset
- Kahilisko
Kaislikossa luita (roughly translates as ”bones amongst the rushes”) is the first set of improvised songs and motifs that I created with a travel setup between Thursday 29 April – Wednesday 5 May in 2021.
I made this album during my stay at my late father’s house in northern Finland. I spent eight days there, arranging his belongings, going through thousands of books, photos and memorabilia gathered during his 85 years. On my day of arrival I laid my instruments on his work desk and would occasionally sit down to play and clear my head to process things. This method and location proved to be extremely fruitful, with 30+ different pieces recorded during my stay.
From the view by the desk I could see a collapsed reindeer pen (reindeers were slaughtered ten years ago after runaway dogs got into the pen and mauled the tiny herd), a nili (a sort of pillar granary used in old times to store food away from animals) peaking from a pile of snow as well as a cottage for banishing evil spirits. The cottage especially has always been hugely inspirational to me, as it’s a calming and mesmerising space, with animal skulls dangling from the roof pillars and a fireplace situated in the middle. It looks like this from the outside:
The titles of songs are derived from western Laplandish dialects (”kahilisko”, ”luukori”), northern mythologies (”maan aliset”) as well as my father’s literary and life work.
These pieces were improvised with quite minimal preparation done, then recorded directly to Zoom. They’re pretty much left ”as is”, except for some post-work with EQ and compression. Power went out three times during one day – which has never happened before – so three pieces were abruptly cut in the middle and Monome Norns was powered from laptop (mistake) which unfortunately provided some audible hiss to some of the songs.
With me I brought Arturia Microfreak (freshly bought on the way up north), eurorack case in which Assimil8or, QPAS and Morphagene played the largest part and Monome Norns (using Otis, Cheat Codes, Twine and Oooooo). Additionally I used my father’s old cassette recorder for some source material.
The album is dedicated to my father and I want to thank this wonderful community for endless inspiration and interesting discussions, plus extra thanks to @Justmat, @infinitedigits @dani_derks and @cfd90 for creating the brilliant tools that were used in the process here.
Here’s some Bandcamp DL codes if you’re interested, you can redeem them here.
y7g4-h6q5
35u4-5gkr
xlze-um7l
het9-e6pj
47nz-3g7y
qldk-humf
9sqk-v5ka
3hb2-krt7
5exw-64uv
b8ce-kme9
anhf-g6rt
