It was a gloomy January evening as I looked at the screen of my phone. It read: Mr. $ is calling. I was just going to sleep, but now a cold fear took over my mind. I let the phone ring, collected my calendar and notebooks, and went to the local bar to check my works and schedules. It turned out that I was the only customer at the bar, but still the dance music was playing so loud that I felt like I had stepped on a cruise ship that all the other passengers had died of the plague. I sat at the corner table and went through my calendar week after week, then checked all five of my notebooks page by page just to see that I couldn’t find any tasks I would have forgotten to take care of. When the bartender refused to serve me any more, I moved to a nearby church park where, while sitting in a snowdrift, I opened my hip flask and admired the high tower of the church and the huge cross at its top and called back to Mr. $. “Nice to hear your voice,” Mr. $ replied (though I hadn’t said a word yet). He then said that the subject of this call was not the warehouse. It was about me having to write liner notes for an album to be released soon. When I asked what kind of album it was, Mr. $ said cryptically that the songs on the album immediately took him to the luxurious cruising ships sailing between Finland and Sweden in the early 1970s. I quickly calculated that he must have been about three years old at the time. To show that I was diligent in my work, or perhaps just because I was trying to come up with something to say, I asked if he had any memories of the time he was three years old and what did he exactly do at a cruise ship’s dance restaurant at the age of three. As our conversation took a considerable break, I began to fear that I would soon receive snail mail including drawing paper and crayons. “You have your hands free,” Mr. $ said. I thanked for the information and - to show that I did take responsibility for what I did - I asked if we would return to the question about the warehouse some other time. “The subject of this call is not the warehouse,” Mr. $ said, ending the call.

***

I opened my computer, downloaded the songs from the Tuonenlehto Orchestra to my computer and started listening to them. The evening was blue, it was snowing with big flakes, I had lived in this apartment for less than a year and been during that period more than two years alone, and I was afraid my neighbors would start to see it, I mean, if not from my face then from my posture, because although I still went jogging every morning at 6.30 I wasn’t sure whether I was jogging upside down. Suddenly, the technology I used to listen to the tracks started bothering me, so I manually transferred them to the C-tape first, from where I copied them to another tape at double the speed of my double deck. Then I settled in my armchair, or rather on the floor, my back against the wall because I didn’t have an armchair, and then I sort of calibrated my thoughts by drinking two cups of vodka and started listening the tracks again. And now, as a warning to anyone who is not - as the saying goes - interested in ancient Greek grammar, now it is a good time to visit ones refrigerator. The album begins with the track Angelique. I immediately slip into its innocent, sincere landscape, as if music refused to participate in the noise of our time and opened up a whole other world and landscape. For a moment I’m in such a good place that I’m afraid I’m going to fall apart, or rather become a pile of cotton - this is the kind of music that doesn’t take over the territories, but provides them. The second track is the heavily breathing, melancholy I Fall In Love Too Easily. The track features a gorgeous bass solo that creates a strong contrast to the theme of light-hearted love and too easy falling in love. A bit like trying to catch a butterfly - instead of something proper - with a wet cardboard box. The third, and the last track on the A-side of the album, The Midnight Sun Will Never Set, goes on by rattling, limping, looping. Those with experience of a nightless night know how it can happen, especially for a newly arrived, that just a moment ago it was five o'clock in the afternoon and now it is five in the morning and that the bailiff is coming to the door in two hours. Then comes the complete reversal, or some other thing of great contrast, as the B-side of the album begins with an upbeat 1930s track, On the Sunny Side of the Street. Followed by Some Of These Days, which is immediately my favorite. It is - according to my notes - the most fast-paced song in the whole, and it has a wonderful organ sound that I say something about in my handwritten papers that I can’t figure out anymore. But that this is at least the one where the drummer, so to speak, gets to go for a walk, I mean, when you have the force, there is no need to constantly show that you have the force. The album’s concluding, sixth track, is a traditional tune Elämän valtatiellä (On The Life’s Highway). It seems to crystallize the spirit of the whole album, i.e. that once I was here, the coffee cost two marks and I went on until I went on no more.

***

When I was convinced of the political frenzy of the album, I decided to call Kusti Vuorinen, the man behind the music. The title of my notes was, "Music and Radical World Peace?". I had met Vuorinen once before, about twenty years ago. I was young and vibrant at the time, but - as the poet says - or even shorter - when Vuorinen introduced me to the office where I would work the next week, I smiled and nodded contentedly, even though I felt a raging horror rising in my heart and soul, because the room seemed to be full of small wooden trolls of which Vuorinen did not mention anything; and it didn’t make me feel any better that Vuorinen invited me to the sauna that evening, supposendly only that I would feel how the walls of the sauna seemed to fall over, or rather curve over me as though I was trapped in a big whiskey barrel. But now the phone call. Vuorinen answered the phone from his car on the way from one rehearsal to another. My appreciation for him grew even more because it was already 2pm and he was apparently the people who were already or still fit to drive at the time. I also appreciated it, as it seemed that Vuorinen focused on driving rather than talking, because it is true that in traffic, when controlling a destructive steel cage, the most important thing is not shouting into the phone. Vuorinen justified the album's song choices on the grounds that they were old entertainment music, close to swing jazz. He simply stated that he wanted to play interesting songs with a good melody. When I asked the reason for rejecting the lyrics, that is, the instrumental versions of the songs, Vuorinen said that he is not a singer, but a musician, and that he is not interested in the lyrics of the songs. Regarding the arrangements of the songs, Vuorinen said that he likes to play so that there would be more silence. When I suggested that silence might be the most challenging style, because in the middle of it all the mistakes are heard, Vuorinen replied that it depends on how you play the mistakes. That you get away with the mistakes if you just play them.

***

As Vuorinen's answers left some things gladly open wide, I called Mike Matthews, who ran - under a pseudonym - a small record company in the Czech Republic, a company which was responsible for distributing Vuorinen's album. Right at the start of the call, Matthews whined that he could no longer smoke a cigar in his office because it was – nowadays – considered dangerous to the health of other workers and that now he had to confine himself to chewing a cigar and swallowing it in the hope of at least some inspiration. When I asked him what he thought about Vuorinen’s music, he replied that he didn’t really think about it, and immediately asked the counter-question that had I heard of a band called Slayer. “Pardon,” I asked. I heard that Matthews had just watched the gig recording from the orchestra and that he was sure that here we had the next The Beatles. Fearing that I would soon be in the elevator going both up and down at the same time, I decided to use the same tactics in my interview as at a bar when the beer doesn’t work anymore and it’s time to consume some absinthe, I mean I quit the interaction section of our talk and started just asking my questions. I asked, or maybe I shouted, do you think that the music Vuorinen plays is a political act?! “Now, listen to me,” Matthews began, and then, pulled away and lowered his voice. "There are people who don't even try to be caught up in this time." I heard what he said, and I wrote down the sentence I heard, and I waited for the sentence to be continued. But since I only heard the silence, I asked yes and what then. “Yeah,” Matthews said after a short pause. I continued on the aggressive strategy I had chosen and shouted that yeah yeah, but in what ways is this album related to the modern times?! After which Matthews replied that the band had electric organs in addition to drums and double bass. “Now that’s a step!”, he said indignantly, or didn’t I think electricity was a modern thing?! And then - quite surprisingly - Matthews asked if I would like to hear a secret. That was, after completed his organ pedal selection he had begun to design a pedal that would turn any instrument connected to it immediately into xxxx xxx.
Olga Orvokki