PAAVOHARJU

Yön Mustia Kukkia

Genre: FOLK / ROOTS, ELECTRONIC

LP (Black Vinyl)
CD

Boomkat Product Review:

Pioneers of Finland’s super influential folk-pop rhizome during the early 2000’s, Paavoharju return with perhaps their most satisfying album since those early days; a surreal delight filled with weirdo pop and folk references obscured by burned out, DIY ambience and found sounds. Utterly gorgeous, crackpot brilliance - big big RIYL Stroom, Islaja, Broadcast, Grouper, Tenniscoats.

When sprawling Finnish collective Paavoharju broke out in 2005 with the now-iconic 'Yhä Hämärää' many were knocked sideways by their effortless blend of crumbling noise, angular, freeform pop and blistered, video game electronics. It was unlike much anyone had heard before, and soon enough their influence snaked through the underground as a kind of screwed variant of the sort of thing Sigur Rós and múm did for the Icelandic scene a few years earlier.

‘Yön Mustia Kukkia’ , their new album, follows commercially unsuccessful ventures into hip hop, and is a real return to form; a weightless wonder that refines and re-invents Paavoharju’s classic sound for a new era. Lauri Ainala still uses his arsenal of decaying cassette tapes and cheap microphones, but his DIY skills have been refined, straddling outsider pop, experimental ambient, free noise and backroom folk. The sound is a real throwback to the glory days of the internet, a time when music production was swiftly democratised and access to sounds from all corners of the globe were suddenly within easy reach for anyone looking for them. A time when traditional sounds bled into grotty metal recordings, 8-bit themes, classic post-punk and head-mangling drone experiments; resulting in a wave of culturally borderless eccentrics who didn't see music in quite the same terms as their predecessors.

For Paavoharju, that creative sprawl was always a product of their relative isolation in Savonlinna, where Ainala and his friends and family were able to take local inspirations and submerge them in an info-stream familiar to anyone who remembers trawling through blogs and P2P programs in the early '00s. This new album is, in turn, shaped by a discovery of faded, 100-year old glass negatives in an abandoned house nearby, and is rumoured to be their swan song, with almost all the members of the band making some kind of contribution - singer Anniina Saksa handling most of the vocals, brothers Lauri and Olli Ainala on production and instrumentation alongside the mysterious Rautavaara, while Teemu Eerola contributes violin, and sound artist Olli Aarni helps out with textures.

Opening track 'Unohtaa' is an icy flashback to Paavoharju’s earliest work: delicate folk-parsonage piano loops that blur beneath dictaphone vocals and environmental detritus. 'Haihtuu' is crystalline pop that sounds as if it's been scorched with the rattle of busted doom jazz; woody, unstable rhythms underpin Saksa's rousing, enigmatic vocals, Eerola's brittle violins place us in darkest Northern Europe over Ainala’s tempered glockenspiel. As the album develops, increasingly odd influences slip through the cracks; ‘Pyhään aukiopaikkaan' is a sort of mangled synthpop, 'Maailma jota ei ole' is noise-laced, soundtrack-ready sacred ambience, 'Yön mustia kukkia' is a muggy hybrid jam you might find on a Sublime Frequencies radio mix, and 'Rasia' is like a dubwise answer to gothy Eastern European art movie jingles.

‘Yön Mustia Kukkia’ is much more than a patchwork of ideas and sketches; in the wreckage of the abandoned buildings that surround their hometown, Paavoharju found a perfect parallel for their stories of hope, nostalgia, spirituality (or lack thereof), friendship, struggle, birth and loss. And If it does end up being their last album, then what a way to go - providing us with a burnished image of a band who helped redraw the borders of Finnish experimental pop music that also happens to be one of the most effortlessly sprawling set of weirdo pop songs we've heard this year.

LP (Black Vinyl) (13)