Lau Nau

Lau Nau is Laura Naukkarinen’s (of Kiila, Hertta Lussu Ässä, Päivänsäde, Avarus and the Anaksimandros) solo project which lives with the help of her friends. Her abstract folk is a mosaic of instruments that fall where they may, with free open structures, balancing on a thin wire of logical evolution, with surprising harmonies. Still, the songs have strong backbones. Melody is suggested through the contours of a wandering and warm voice. Lau Nau’s debut record "Kuutarha" (Locust 2005) have found a relatively wide audience, being an amazingly beautiful slice of outdoor sounds, multi-instrumentation and as surreal, lush vocals. Her next album is under process at the moment and will be released by Locust year 2008.

"The music, compared to reading literature, is a book with the leaves spread in the order of a tree. You get a three-dimensional picture, like nature's sounds from a human soul."

Besides of her albums and appeareances on compilations, Lau Nau has participated in making music for Magnum Photo essays on internet (2006) and for Japanese photographer Moriyama Daido’s exhibition (2007). She has also done various sound art installations and sound workshops for children with Antti Tolvi. Lau Nau has participated in making improvised live music for the following films:
Dziga Vertov: "Man with a Movie Camera", Turku Film Archive, 2004
Short films and projections, Anthology Film Archive, New York, 2006
Benjamin Christensen: "Witchcraft through the ages", Bio Rex, Helsinki, Finland, 2007
Carl Dreyer: "La passion de Joan d’Arc", Tromso stumfilmdager, Norway, 2007

Lau Nau is also known for having a record label (POK, now changing its name to Peippo) with Antti Tolvi and for organizing concerts and tours. She enjoys of playing at small, intimate venues like The Old Bookmill at Montague, USA, or galleries such as Westers at Kemiö Island, Finland, but she has been also fortunate to play in such wider spaces as Stockholm’s Kulturhuset, New York Anthology Film Archives, Ars Nova Aboa Vetus museum in Turku, Contemporary art centers at Glasgow and Brussels, or with special guests as Tony Conrad in Avanto festival, Helsinki. Her show in Philadelphia, 2005, was rated as one of the 50 best concerts of all time by the Wire magazine.

"The best set came from Lau Nau, the trio led by Laura Naukkarinen. Visibly pregnant, Naukkarinen gently strummed and bowed her stringed tools with soft precision, like a snake shedding its skin. Her spiralling songs were the most enchanting parts of an evening full of indoor campfires. Together, she and her Finnish comrades flipped the concept of the house show on its head, making a cosy indoor nook feel like the great outdoors." (-Marc Masters, The Wire, Feb 07: "50 concerts that shook the world")


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Reviews of the album:
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Tomutonttu

Tomutonttu is Jan Anderzén, the leading clown of Kemialliset Ystävät. Toy reed streams, mutilated vocals and groovy loops of animal noise are some of the colors used to create the whirling mess that is the lonely song of Tomutonttu. It is like a confusing detail from the KY freedom flow, a microcosmos of strange sound creatures and dirt flying around and interacting with a logic all their own.

Pymathon

Pymathon is a metal duo who have been active since autumn 2005. Jaakko Tolvi plays drums, Topias Tiheäsalo plays guitar. The duo's approach and central idea is quite easy to describe: to play improvised metal. Both having background in improvised music in its various forms, their metal attack's influences can be tracked down to early trash and death metal. Reaching for a straightforward execution, Pymathon's music is a lesson both in speed and inaccuracy.

Jaakko Tolvi (b. 1982) has been one of the main percussionists within the Finnish free improvising scene for the recent years. He has been active both as a touring and as a recording musician in various groups including Rauhan Orkesteri, Lauhkeat Lampaat (a duo together with his brother Antti), Kiila and Kemialliset Ystävät to name but a few.

Topias Tiheäsalo (b. 1978) has studied classical guitar, but during and especially after his studies he has mainly devoted himself to improvised music. In addition to Pymathon he shares various free improvising projects with Jaakko and also regularly plays solo concerts. His first solo CD was released by Tyyfus in early 2007.
Pymathon's debut release is a split-LP together with a Finnish drums and electronics duo Gentle Evil. The disc is out on Helsinki based label Verdura Records. The duo's members have (both together and separately) played such festivals as Instal and Music Lovers Field Companion in the UK, SKIF in Russia, Borealis in Norway and Avanto and Potlatch festivals in Finland.

Kuupuu

"The fascinating Finnish psychedelic free folk scene is continually morphing, and Kuupuu (aka Jonna Karanka) is currently one of the movement's darkest stars." Edwin Pouncey / The Wire 278

"Jonna Karanka is uniquely imaginitive and mesmerizingly inquisitive sound- and songmaker. It is never possible to say if she is following a vision or just taps along to what is coming from her unconscious. Probably both. Her songs and tracks are dreamlike, of an eerie beauty and seem to work out of themselves with ease. I have no other ways to describe this mystery than in equally mysterious terms. With everything that is psychedelic in the true sense of the word, and not the hippy-trodden term that denounces longwinded guitar solos without energy, description is hard. Listen for yourself and you’ll see what I mean." Cracked Review February 2007

"Kuupuu is the work of Jonna Karanka, who has spent time in Avarus and The Anaksimandros, and her self-released solo outing Kulta Sulka is one of the many gems to hail from the Finnish scene. Her sound kaleidoscopes indicate a tenuous grip on the art of songwriting, often meandering into eerie loops of breathy woodwinds trapped in cyclonic infinitude, or murky collages distorted with cheaply rendered, sci-fi laser pings. Yet Karanka's dreamily cracked songs are her strenght, and they ache with the melancholy of the best acid folk chanteuses the 70s had to offer." Jim Haynes The Wire 268