Author: Lauri

  • Concert at Hvalfjörður

    On the 29th of June 2025, I played an acoustic concert at Hallgrímskirkjan í Saurbæ, a small church at a beautiful fjord in Iceland. I was asked to write a text for the handout. Here’s what I wrote.

    When I was 17, I came to Hvalfjörður with the intention to stay there for one week. The atmosphere opened a door, liberating a flow of music and poetry inside me, and blurring my sense of time: one week became two, then three. At the end of those weeks, I didn’t want to leave.

    On our drive back to Reykjavík, I tried pointing my Olympus film camera towards the mountains, to capture a memory of the landscape and bring it back to Finland with me, but no matter how I tried, the narrow-angle optics could frame only a rock or two within the viewfinder.

    This landscape had healed something in me, and as much as I loved it, I couldn’t bring it back with me. I couldn’t capture the experience of being here among these mountains and fjords with my camera, not the way I felt it.

    This turned out to be one of my deepest and most enduring realisations in life. My only option was to simply let the landscape transform something deep within me, affect me with its beauty.

    Like most music, mine is also made of melody and rhythm, but what I’m thinking the most about when I compose is space. I think of the emptiness around the notes — not necessarily pauses or rhythmic gaps, but the spatiality embracing the music: the lived experience of being here with sound.

    Many of the songs I play today were composed during the pandemic. I called them a reflection of the collective sense of emptiness the world shared during those unreal times. Some of them became quite popular online during the last three years. But for me, they are songs that are meant to be played in a small room, like a living room, or a small church.

    The cupolas that I play are empty vessels built of metal. An empty church is made of stone. We are made of bone and flesh and whatever our soul is made of. We, too, are empty, and we often try to fill our emptiness with whatever we can. Similarly, the songs are empty until we fill them with our own presence.

    Thank you for being here today with these songs.

  • XLI (birthday reflection)

    Yesterday was my birthday. The cosmic milestone numbered 41 has been encountered and joyfully embraced — even though this number is seldom greatly celebrated. The round, existentially charged classic preceding it (40) and the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything following it (42) easily overshadow it. Nevertheless, forty-one is a prime number, which is charming in its own special way. If I live to be one hundred and one, I’m now exactly halfway through my prime number sequence.

    Yesterday, many people sent me birthday wishes on social media, participating in a ritual that grows more touching each year. Many well-wishers I haven’t even seen in a long time, yet I smiled at each of their names. Clearly, many find it worth celebrating that, long ago and quite unexpectedly, I was born! Of course, my birth wasn’t a surprise to my parents, but the true nature of what happened only became clear to me much later. Existence is total and irreversible: once you have been born, you cannot become unborn again.

    As children, we always pondered what we would become when we grew up. Usually, there were about a handful of possible answers. I knew from quite a young age that I would become a musician. As a teenager, I wrote hundreds of songs on guitar. A little later, I learned how to make electronic music with samplers and synths. For the last 12 years, I’ve dedicated myself to mastering the handpan. And in the past couple of years, I’ve focused on contemplating space, echoes, and echoes of echoes. My musicianship is constantly flowing towards something new—new sounds or new ways of thinking about or experiencing music. It’s an immense relief that becoming a musician didn’t end at some specific point!

    Yet we are always in the process of becoming something, atom by atom, something different from what we initially were. A tiny particle vibrating in emptiness has become part of the being (me) writing this very sentence.

    In the impulse behind this text, there is joy, gratitude, and love. On the morning of my birthday, I was awakened by singing. Taika and Seela had set breakfast in our backyard at the edge of the forest. Birds were singing, and the sun was shining. Being able to reach the age represented by the thirteenth prime number, drink tea, and eat cape gooseberries with loved ones is absolutely incredible!

    This writing also carries sadness. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be honest. The reasons probably don’t need further explanation—there are surely enough of them in each of our hearts upon reflection.

    Our world has somehow become the way it is. We have become the way we are. However, the most important thing isn’t how we’ve arrived at this point, but what our hearts turn toward — what we will become next.

  • A photographic ear

    We cannot shut down our hearing at will, or crop certain sounds out of our auditory field, the way we can close our eyes or turn our heads to block unwanted sights. Still, we often expect a certain raw, unfiltered fidelity between the acoustic world and our experience of sound — I call this sonance.

    Yet this experience is far from raw. It is full of interpretation, adjustment, and meaning-making. Listening is not a photographic record of the acoustic properties of a space at a given moment. Through concentration and focus, we can “zoom in” on particular qualities of sonance, discerning distances, directions, material textures, even the temperature or humidity of a space — simply by listening.

    Michael Carnes, musician and developer behind Exponential Audio and the classic Lexicon 960L algorithms, observes the same phenomenon: “I’m quite convinced we don’t hear it [reverb] photographically.”

    For Carnes, reverb is more about feeling and experience — about sonance — than it is about capturing a perfect acoustic snapshot of a moment.

    Sound and light often behave similarly, bouncing off surfaces, creating resonant colors, blurred rainbows, diffused gradients, and geometric phasing patterns. Yet in other ways, they are radically different. Light reaches our eyes instantly and absolutely. Sound, by contrast, is always already disappearing — arriving, passing through us, fading into memory.

    Leonardo da Vinci did not consider music a high form of art compared to painting, precisely because of its ephemeral nature. Visual arts, for him, could capture something lasting of human existence. Probably he would have preferred convolution over algorithmic reverb — the former recreating room acoustics based on real-life recordings, while the latter seeks not mathematical precision, but a reconstruction of sonance: the felt experience of being within a space.

    With sonance, there is always the initial arrival of sound (presonance), the living presence of sound (resonance), and the inevitable fading away (desonance). And the complete and final non-existence, absonance.

    Carnes describes this ephemerality beautifully: “If we’re listening carefully, we can reconstruct a lot of what may have happened, but there’s a level of detail that’s forever lost.”

    This is the beauty of echosophy: the art of listening not just to sounds, but to our own being as it arises and fades in time and space. By opening our ears to the world and listening closely, we become space.