Time holds up when you listen to Valot Kaukaa, like it can do in the north in the deep of winter, and you find yourself only taking breathes in the pauses between tracks. The evolutionary spread of texture, both soft as flannel and bristly like raw fleece, is certainly comparable to Sibelius’ arrangements.
[Release page] Olli Aarni, whose now-retired Ous Mal project produced a half-dozen CDs and tapes in just the past few years, is following no leader. He has many a kindred spirit but few equals in lo-fi, distressed and experimental ambient. Valot Kaukaa—”lights from far away”—is Aarni’s first work under the name Nuojuva. Its ambience is crackling with electricity—perhaps an audible echo of those billowing lights from far away, the aurora borealis. Its thick, woolly texture is detailed with “small instruments,” as he calls them—cello, viola, flute and violin—provided by a handful of Finnish colleagues and labelmate, pianist Sophie Hutchings, with Rachel Evans (aka Motion Sickness of Time Travel) adding impressionistic vocals to two tracks, one voice among many that murmur secrets throughout the album. On “Pihlajan Varjoissa,” Mikkael Myrskog plays melodica with the same sweet swing as Toots Thielsmans on jazz harmonica.
If Ous Mal often made overt reference to Finnish folk music (the Karelian kantale featuring most prominently), then Nuojuva makes more covert reference to Jean Sibelius, the composer whose symphonies played such a large part in influencing the Romantic notion of Finland’s austere nature. Time holds up when you listen to Valot Kaukaa, like it can do in the north in the deep of winter, and you find yourself only taking breathes in the pauses between tracks. The evolutionary spread of texture, both soft as flannel and bristly like raw fleece, is certainly comparable to Sibelius’ arrangements. They appeal with immediacy to both the heart and the mind. There are lullabys sung under damp highway underpasses but there is also a pure, gathered-round-the-hearth warmth, particularly explicit when Anna Tötterström plucks her violin on “Kaipaa” or in Hutchings’ elegant, avant-homespun piano on “Laasko.”
Aarni’s dexterity in stitching an enfolding quilt out of a skewed but treasured vision of folk ambient is utterly enchanting, a referential but unique version, purpose worn and threadbare in places, ragged at the edges. Ous Mal was great and Nuojuva is its natural successor. Nuojuva is simply a new skin with a more mature, weathered complexion. Olli Aarni may well be the first artist to have successfully married the sensibilities of the ambient tape underground and the misleadingly-named “modern classical” genre. It’s actually consummate contemporary folk art.
Valot Kaukaa is available on Preservation. [Release page]
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