Foremost among the scene's solo voices, the obtuse wanderings of Islaja's solemn lyrical explorations are a strong counterpoint to the more distended psychedelia of her label compatriots. A intimately inward-looking music mapping the physical and psychic landscape of rural Finland; mountains, clouds sun and sea make up Merja Kokkonen's thematic and lyrical geography. Another of the label's idiosyncratic, finely honed soundworlds can be heard in the music of Laura Naukkarinen. Her breathy open songforms built of fragile, spectral states center around ambient improvisation and extended drone exercise. Arriving with significant fanfare, the finesse of the debut "Kuutarha" garnered inclusion in the 50 Albums of the Year in The Wire's 2005 Rewind. Employing strings, dulcimer and an array of acoustic instruments Lau Nau's ear for protracted tonal explorations was further realized in the following "Nukuu" of 2008. Embracing psychedelia and northern folk traditions as much as the avant-garde of mid-Century minimalism, the course of Naukkarinen's creative arc has most recent arrived at producing scores for Benjamin Christensen's "Haxan", Jean Epstein's "The Fall of the House of Usher", Robert Wien's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and the seminal horror of Victor Sjöström's haunting, "The Phantom Carriage". This affinity for the contained world's of early silent and Expressionist cinema has informed her most recent, ”Hem. Någonstans”. An instrumental album spinning variations around Naukkarinen's soundtrack to Lotta Petronella's similarly named documentary film, ”Home. Somewhere”, it's focus the quietude and small events that comprise the lives of those living in a remote Finnish archipelago. Later this month and next, Lau Nau will be bringing her musical mirroring of the subtly experimental documentary film on a west coast tour, with a series of dates in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and a span of events in the San Francisco Bay Area, fittingly hosted in smaller, intimate environments and community cultural centers.
