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.