I met Eva Alkula at the Nordic Music Days in Norrköping, Sweden, in late August 2007. Her light, transparent looks and her intense eyes immediately caught my attention, and I understood that she was the kantele player announced in the program for the festival. When I came upon her she was on her way to a place called the Sound Hut – a tiny wooden hut that could harbor maybe around eight persons in addition to a musician, and then it would be crowded! The idea was to experience intimate music in an intimate concert situation, and for sure, these were the conditions at all the performances in the Sound Hut.

I talked to her, and she explained that she mostly plays contemporary kantele music, but that she has a classical kantele education. I asked her – in my ignorance – if she by classical kantele meant folk music, but she was clear to tell me that she actually and indeed meant what she said: classical music for kantele. Then, after a while, it was a natural evolution to drift into contemporary music, and she told me that she also works with electronic music, of course also in connection with kantele.

The concert at the Nordic Music Days was brilliant, and surprising to me. Of course it’s no new thing to use traditional instruments in new ways, but I wasn’t aware of contemporary music for kantele. When asked, Eva Alkula told me that there are quite a lot of contemporary compositions written for kantele in Finland, mostly by younger composers, but also by such established composers as Per Henrik Nordgren and others.

At the Sound Hut Eva played compositions by two Finnish composers who were present: Harri Suilamo och Fridrich Bruk.

If you venture over to Eva Alkula’s site, you can read all the details about her, but I might mention a few brief biographical notes here as well:

She studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, earning her Masters in Music in 2003. Before that she studied koto in Japan from 1999 to 2000. Aside from performing as a solo kantele and kantele/electronics musician she also plays with various chamber ensembles concerned with folk music instruments from Japan, China, Russia and Finland – and I’m sure; in an unorthodox way. She has premiered works for kantele by contemporary composers in Finland as well as abroad.
In addition, Eva Alkula has worked as a musician at several theatres and opera houses, such as Von Krahl Theater (Tallinn), Savonlinna Opera Festival, The Finnish National Theater, The Swedish Theater in Helsinki and The Finnish National Opera.

She visits Japan regularly, to perform.

Eva Alkula was one of the most surprising artists that I met at the Swedish Music Days. In most cases I had a pretty good idea about what I was going to hear, but Eva struck me with her fresh approach, leaving a lasting impression in my mind. Hers was one of three concerts that stayed – and stays – with me. The others, contrary to hers, were large-scale works in big concert halls, like Juliana Hodkinson’s I Greet You A Thousand Times and Karin Rhenqvist’s To The Angel With The Burning Hands.

On the CD she slipped me on the way to the Sound Hut she collaborates with Ville Hyvönen, electronics. It is their collaborative duo that is called memnon, I believe.

I’ll go through a few of the tracks on the memnon CD – which was released in June 2007 – and let my mind wander, as my body recently wandered through the Lapland valleys of Unna Reaiddávággi and Sielmavaggi just days before I descended on the Nordic Music Days.

Track 1 – pim [9:18] – has a meager, all but imperceptible beginning, Eva playing the kantele in lucid, light, spidery fingerings, in slight, aural electronic embellishments. A fly seems to pass the microphone at one instance, and minuscule disturbances on the surface of tight beauty continues later on, in minute growls and hoarse elf mutterings. Softly brown percussive thumps measure the sounding space and offer some anchorage of the fleeting images of the soaring kantele, which treads ever so lightly through sacred life.

Eva keeps playing a repeated pattern which steadily grows on you, finally holding you in a steady grip by the neck, pushing you forward through bewitched circumstances; dimly lit figures swaying in the transcendental kantele light.

It is immensely beautiful and also enchanting; the light of the sound misty, bluish – a Stockhausen scenography of the mind. She could coax me anywhere with these fairytale sonorities.

Further on up in the composition Eva strikes thicker strings of the kantele, which, through the electronics, counter-pointing lighter kantele sounds, makes for a full, gluey sound, deep with bass and strewn with light brass bells of hypnotism.

Many of these sounds do sound familiar, as does the repetition of the pattern and the small, crackling electronic abrasions – and I realize I’m thinking of Björk and her Vespertine album. Yes, Eva Alkula and Ville Hyvönen do sound like Matmos here: not a bad duo to be compared with! Ah, so beautiful!

Track 2 – keli [6:04] – comes sliding, slipping on a rough surface; probably Eva letting something slide along the strings, conjuring up visions in my mind of passing time, jet streams in the sky, slowly turning celestial bodies and bodies floating in water, submerged, arms stretched out from the bodies; dead bodies or dreaming bodies.

A quirky, squeamish spark, a slowly emerging kantele and a shadow play of electroacoustics spread the sentiments of calm abiding across the sonic topography; a view from the canyon of Singivaggi, deep down into Tjäktjavagge with it’s meandering jåkk – and I even hear actual water sounds in this music. Nothing is hurried; everything is allowed its natural time, its natural cause of events, Dalai lamish!

Track 3 – sekuni [5:01] – delivers a popping, rickety racking, bubbly, wobbling, tickling minimalistic rhythm from the beginning, under the sensation of an overarching motion, containing these small rhythmic progressions, making me envision wave after wave rolling in, each one with myriads of reflections blasting off like shiny, white arrows. Sonic events move on two very different planes here, in two temporally separated layers, which, however, soar in perfect harmony with each other, like the sun moving through space in a slingshot around the galaxy, with Earth and the other planets rotating around it. This is the most delicious blend of kantele electronica on the verge of Björk’s Icelandic tour de force hypnotics. I could live like this, all spirit, no body. Bodies are only in the way!

I’ll leave it at that. There are wilder passages further up ahead, and fantastic measures of intricacy, as well as a lucid game with opposing rhythms and meandering layers of slithering motions, as a dark and heavy rhythm surrounded by distant textsound-poetic voices crawls upon you as time goes by, upon which a shimmer of kantele light simmers.

The CD is a fluid corpus of intrinsic beauty and relaxed excitement. Brilliant!