Tag: writing

  • 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.

  • Echo guides you home

    People are looking for a home in experience – or rather an experience that feels like a home. When they are at home, they are not out there, separated from their origin. They have returned to something that allows them to be at ease. (By “home” I mean an existential home, not the actual home, or a nostalgic childhood home, of individuals.)

    A religious experience can be described as a homecoming, a return, a definitive answer to the fundamental ubitas, a recurring and insisting “where am I?”. When one returns home, one does not need to leave anymore. The existential location has been defined not in contrast to the surroundings, or by geographic coordinates, but by experience itself. It is an affirming answer to the question: “Do you know where you are?”

    The irony of “looking for one’s true self” is that people look inward when they should be looking out in the universe. Only by witnessing their own existence through their own being can they actually recognize that they exist in the world, as a mind and a body.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self.

    “It’s all in your mind”, is an explanation often given by New-Age folks, Neo-Platonists, or Cyber-Gnostic Matrix fans. These ideas can be either dismissed as individualist solipsism (“all of this exist in MY mind”), or more rarely understood as a limitation set by a mind that is dampening its resonating potential with complicated and overlapping feedback loops that cancel out their own resonance; in much simpler words: we can potentially find everything by tracing back our mind, but too many conceptual explanations obscure the direct experience.

    Finding a home in one’s own experience is allowing the self to merge together with the resonance of the world. In this experience the individual disappears and becomes one with the phenomenal world. This experience may be considered ‘religious’ because it transcends all ready-made concepts, and without an ego in the way, the experience might evoke a sensation of ‘being in God’ or ‘being the ultimate truth’ — although verbalising or defining the experience conceptually will inevitably push it further back from the unhinged openness it requires.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self. Follow the echo, and keep your mind quiet.

  • Re: What Is an Echo?

    What is an echo?

    A shift in time, a disintegrating waveform record of time and space, a return of an old friend.

    What is an echo?

    An observation of recurrence, an inner reflection of the world out there, an outer and inner resonance.

    What is an echo?

    A constant rise and fading of the sonorous, an observer relating to the where-and-when, an arriving and a leaving of a lingering question in the ear of someone who listens deeply:

    what is an echo?