Stupid scientists still haven’t invented the teleporter, and thanks to that I will be missing Jonna Karanka aka the Finnish forest psychfolk/experimentation amazer Kuupuu tonight. The reason being, I’m floored from last night’s Trus’me performance, and the concert is on the other side of the city at Arkaoda, and you know I never go to the other side of the city anyways. Just might break that rule for once, for the upcoming Sir Richard Bishop concert though, once again organized by the amazing Bant team. Still, spent most of the day listening to her new LP on Time-Lag Records which, if my memory serves me right, is more coherent and refined than her previous efforts.

Kuupuu is a bit like a Finnish Grouper, her songs are murky and mysterious, the sounds feel disembodied and otherworldly, her vocals are ghostlike and gauzy, but those Grouper-like sounds are filtered through her Finnish folk filter, having spent time in Avarus, Anaksimandros and a handful of other big time aQ faves. Nearly half the record is made up of hushed intimate lo-fi ballads, muted and muddy and almost underwater sounding, her voice and musical accompaniment bleeding into each other until it’s sometimes almost impossible to tell which is which, but those stretches of bleary eyed balladic drift and muffled shimmery dreamdrone are peppered with chucks of weird soft noise, abstract rhythmic workouts and some strange very Finnish sounding bursts of what-the-fuck chaos: plenty of clattery tribal percussion, detuned guitars, demented music box melodies, field recordings and found sounds, tape manipulation, gongs and bells and birdcalls, looped acoustic guitars, super lo-fi tape recorded voices, swooping backwards melodies, and the occasional jagged shard of feedback or streak of fractured crunch, but somehow Kuupuu manages to tie it all together into something much more cohesive and lovely than you might imagine. Aquarius Records

Image nicked from The Forest Archives