Valekaunis.

I make experimental music. I have always tried to learn new ways of making my own music. This does not mean I make music deliberately difficult to listen or try to find the most complex way of making music. I just want to experiment and learn. I do not really care about genres or what is fashionable right now etc. I like to mix together everything that I know and try to get it to work somehow. Mostly I just fail miserably but that is also one way of learning something new! Shitty track with weird (good) sound is a success for me because it can be remixed later.

The main reason why I make music is simply this: because I like making my own music. It also has to be interesting enough for me to concentrate at that given moment. This is why I can never use one specific idea or way of making music for too long! I try to change methods all the time and leave (or forget) unfinished projects to my archives if I get bored with them. ’Valekaunis’ is a very good example of this kind of behavior. It is a music ”project” that took over 14 years to get finished. I did not plan it - it just happened this way! Ok. I just wanted to tell you this before starting to open the story of the birth of ’Valekaunis’. Just for you to know!

So. As I mentioned, ’Valekaunis' is an album that really took it's time to get finished. It started in 2004 and continued until 2006 as I recorded several experimental music sessions with my respected colleagues and friends, Sami Louhela and Ville Suopajärvi. I did not plan to do anything with the recorded music sessions than just save them in my music archives for ”later listening”. I forgot them completely.

Years later, in 2013 I found the sessions and listened them again. I instantly wanted to test some new ways of mixing their weird but quite lo-fi sounds. As I made different sound/producing experiments and mixed the individual sessions together, the result was several tracks with experimental mixtures of various musical genres but with cohesive sound. The first version of 'Valekaunis' saw the daylight in February 2015.

As years passed I listened the first version of 'Valekaunis' from time to time. I thought that it had it's moments but it somehow did not work as I wanted. So I decided to cut some of the material away and mix and master whole album again. I did this several times and slowly the album started to sound right. Finally in the beginning of May 2018, after three years of seasonal mixing and mastering, ’Valekaunis' was in it's sixth and final form. An idea of making a cassette out of it had been in my mind for a year or more. But it had to be my own project, no record labels involved! Something my very own, something personal.

I have never done this kind of album before and that makes 'Valekaunis' special for me. It has some kind of naivety in it's core (simple melodies and some 'cute' sounds) but there are still serious overtones in the overall sound. It has the familiar sounds from the sessions I played with my friends but those sessions have been sampled or remixed and recorded again live with different electronic instruments. It has also been recycled through samplers or music tracker softwares adding all kinds of different sounds to it. This experimental way of producing and composing all tracks on this album has changed it to something of it's own. Hypnotic, almost psychedelic. Calm but ominous.

The beautiful album art is done by Samuli Huttunen and it presents perfectly the spirit of ’Valekaunis’, more of fantasy and dream-like state in post-apocalyptic surroundings.

'Valekaunis' is like a dark bedtime story with no words to tell the plot so it can be interpret however the listener chooses. 'Valekaunis' is a fictitious word of Finnish language. It translates to 'fake beauty'.