(Psych Folk) Lau Nau - Nukkuu - 2008, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Nukkuu (Finnish for Sleeps) is the long awaited sophomore album by celebrated Finnish femme folk fave Lau Nau. Nukkuu is psychedelic, abstract & emotionally captivating. Nukkuu is an album of changes. In the years since her debut album Kuutarha, Laura became a mother, moved to the Finnish countryside and took valuable time to carve out a space for her enchanted art in the new found tranquility of her remote surroundings. Conceived in tight attics and vacant dens on off hours when her young son Nuutti was fast asleep, this is an intimately crafted 9 song collection that unfolds like dreamlike musical ribbons for the senses and delivers the listener to a place of unhurried contentedness.

Lau Nau’s sophomore effort is paradoxical: a series of drawn out emotions as repetitious photo essay, but as each photo focuses it soon after dissolves, reappearing once again, free from scrutiny, at the peripherals of the already pointillist story. In so many words, its beauty is frequently apparent but its motives and meanings elusive—skittish, too, refusing to connote one thing at a time. Its prettiness is unnerving; its surreality feels oddly tactile; its angst feels resigned; the whole record sounds gently but powerfully in flux.
Due, in principle, to Lau Nau’s chameleonic vocals. “Rubiinilasia” exemplifies this: church bells recede to reveal a slight organ over which Lau Nau-as-specter wearily hovers, her tone almost a taunt, disquieting and low. The effect is something like clattering paper clips inside a snow globe as frigid air rushes through the weather inside, fake hope leaving the fake town as quickly as sparks. Midway through, though, she shifts tenor, letting her croon soar into boundless echo, and the organ that served as haunting ambience becomes a galvanizing breeze. There’s even a whiff of exhilaration before the track falls on a bed of perpetually reconfiguring black fuzz. It all plays out like a perception of death, at once terrifying and bleak and maybe childish, but over time, fear subsides, leading to an inevitable acceptance of mortality. Lau Nau’s voice is an amazingly malleable instrument; as she moves up a few octaves and leavens her inflection, she creates a hopefulness that paints the distortion as a warm shroud rather than an austere fate. Her comfort, then, is how readily she can use that instrument to transform, even capture, her surroundings; our comfort is the fascination inherent in watching such a seamless act.
In fact, Nukkuu, in its own quiet way, bursts with fascinating uses of sound, and that uniqueness works wonders in augmenting its emotional weight; this stuff would be gripping your mind were it not so busy breaking your heart. “Maapahkinapuu” rises and falls as subtly as slumberous breathing patterns, Lau Nau’s soothing siren song and ambient stardust permeating the track, which periodically hiccups before returning to its soft inertness. “Mooste” is a skittering music box, juxtaposing comforting lullabies with frantic clicking, which sounds like someone attempting in vain to spark a lighter in a brisk wind, and as that struggle subsides, oscillating coos under ear-splitting clanging, the whole becomes increasingly muted and melodic while negative space begins to subsume the track.
These sounds don’t come together to create lush soundscapes so much as sit there like scattered puzzle pieces. They are as fractured as the emotions they seem to convey, their assemblage set in motion by Lau Nau’s equally fractured voice. A falling leaf with no ground beneath, she never reaches full-throated catharsis nor a resolute somberness—just as her compositions never really swell. And yet her music’s pathos still finds its own way to dizzying heights. “Vuoren laelle” commences with warm humming and ascending pianos before Lau Nau steps forward to deliver the sweetest of hymns, caressing each syllable before moving on to the next, setting up bittersweetness and playing with how to soothe it. Then she falls back into that complacent hum, aloof as ever, and we’re left to gawk as the album fades to a close. The ache is gorgeous but still an ache: Lau Nau would rather not dwell, preferring to provide us with glimpses instead of all-out exposure, instead of that solid and permanent photograph of something that a photograph could never really capture, anyways.
Such restraint, I think, renders all of this so poignant. Nukkuu is comely in its meekness, expressing not only the peaks and valleys of, get this, existence, but the spans of those extremes, articulating the fleeting nature of our experiences through its slight, perpetual motion. Life moves pretty fast and in incomprehensible directions, but none too suddenly, and, mirroring that, Lau Nau’s compositions are amorphous, changing, seemingly innocuous, in the way we ourselves do over time. Nukkuu doesn’t confront us with these revelations so much as imply them, ladling out as palpably as possible the ineffable qualities of living, breathing, beautiful potentiality, crying while you’re eating pancakes, the whole shebang. It’s a gargantuan concept to tackle, and perhaps Lau Nau succeeds because she doesn’t try to wrap it in her meager wingspan, but chooses instead to gesture discreetly towards it as, of course, she gestures towards so many other disparate places.
Linking a work so thoroughly equivocal to such heavy themes may seem silly, but this mound of cosmic garbage makes such implicit sense. It’s as if reality and every possible reality were imagined to be a ball of yarn in the sky, intertwined but poised to be unraveled, and then Lau Nau relents because, shit, that would take forever—and yeah: stonerisms, I know. But Nukkuu is pliable enough to accommodate the most frequently conflicting interpretations, simultaneously, and something this mired in fog is probably best internalized at the most personal of levels anyway. It is, in short, magic. Even now my toes are tingling.
Still, poignancy and vividness are conveyed in strange ways throughout this soup. Like on “Lue Kartalta,” strings pop and whirr with no discernible pattern, then Lau Nau enters and it all clicks: she plays with the discordance, cajoling it into a fitting duet partner for her deliberate lullaby. We finally get a glimpse into what all of this means—here, specifically, somber hopefulness, but moments like this crop up throughout and disperse just as quickly, adding a vivaciousness to all the cosmic, ponderous murk I’ve probably draped unattractively around the album by now. Vivacious on their own merits, the songs beg for personification if only to sit at the edges of consciousness (big reveal: Nukkuu is Finnish for “sleep”), staring, evading attempts at understanding them much beyond the lesser extent to which we understand the pulse of our own emotions. And no shit, that’s what they want us to think, that delineating this album’s cryptic contours is roughly as difficult and as scary as tracing the folds of the human mind. It doesn’t work that well because that sort of brain-numbing breadth combined with the raw beauty at hand make for a transcendent listening experience somewhere between religious awakening and good weed music. Hallelujah. And, no, that’s not Finnish.

It's a shame that the term "free folk" has been employed as a crutch to describe various rural dwelling musicians who all happen to make improvisational psych with a covert touch of American roots music, or idiosyncratic singer-songwriters whose sounds sometimes seem to hail from another, perhaps alternate era. Because the phrase truly belongs to abstract Finnish multi-instrumentalist Laura Naukkarinen (a.k.a Lau Nau). The three years since her debut, Kuutarha, have found her relocating to rural western Finland in order to raise her newborn son, and no doubt both place and motherhood affect the music on Nukkuu, an album of seemingly random placidity.
With musical assistance from her partner, Antti Tolvi, and traditional Finnish bowed lyre player Pekko Kappi, Naukkarinen––again playing at least 50 instruments, including juice glasses and fart whistle––approaches music as found sound. She mixes Estonian field recordings, toy piano samples, snippets of conversation, and church bells into noises as gentle and suggestive as that of a rose petal being plucked. Her use of drones is pervasive yet subtle, ultimately wandering with the tunes more than guiding them, making everything she touches some sort of fragmented lullaby or a recording of dreams. To say Nukkuu is the most gorgeous, meditative album ever made wouldn't be hype.
"Painovoimaa, valoa," with Kappi's lyre and layers of wordless vocals, is––to use a simple term effectively––peaceful. Like much of the music here, it seems to crawl out of itself, finally arriving at a fully formed song near its end. In fact Naukkarinen's vocals throughout much of this album are overdubbed in soft layers, weaving in and out and making room for other instruments. What underpins most of the tracks are a few chords or a melody, plucked on some odd ukulele or nylon-stringed guitar, snuggling under drones produced by bowed instruments or a distant organ. However, on "Lahtolaulu," she turns to a heavily distorted electric guitar and builds up a repetitive racket, giving the heavy grooves laid down by Mauritanian guitarist Hamadi Ould Nana a run for their money without sacrificing an iota of the bliss she's sustained.
Using odd instruments to make improvisational sounds and rhythms is hardly radical, but making music as compelling as the stuff on this CD will never cease to be. No doubt Naukkarinen, and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, some of her Finnish musical mates (such as Kemialliset Ystävät) are ever so unwearily taking pop music out way past the song. May they never bring it back.
Bruce Miller

The Swedes like to joke that the Finns don’t have a language – just a mix of commonly understood grunts and gobbledygook. If you have heard Finnish before you might be inclined to agree – speaking it is sort of like getting into a broken bottle fight with your tongue. This is why Finnish songstress Lau Nau’s music is so surprising. She takes one of the most guttural lexicons in the world somehow bends it into overwhelmingly gorgeous, psych-folk music. I would say that it sounds like LSD-induced bliss, except that the natural purity of the music seems untainted by the presence of mood enhancing drugs in a way that many similar freak folkers have not attained.
Nau’s recent LP Nukkuu takes inspiration from her home deep in the Finnish countryside where she has chosen to isolate herself. In sessions that coincided with her son’s naps (Nukkuu is Finnish for sleep) Nau crafted compositions that embody a meeting of nature and music. Out of that commune comes a set of nine songs, each brimming with found sounds, mystical melodies, and ghostly vocal arrangements. The tunes themselves are blankets of distortion, strings, chimes and bells, all layered into complex scores that are impossible to really understand, yet fall gently and easily upon the ears.
The opening track, “Lue Kartala,” is a test of whether or not you are ready to take the plunge. Hardly even classifiable as music, the jumble of vocals and erhu(?) plucking is one of the strangest tracks on the record. Stick with it though and you are rewarded with “Painovoma, Valoa,” an East-Asia inspired string orchestration that soothes like a cool breeze. In addition to possibly having the most U’s in any song title I have seen, “Ruususuu” also has one of the most delicately understated melodies of the record. Employing toy piano, strings, and multi-layered mumblings, the track contains both a haunting dread as well as an airy lightness, the dichotomy enhancing rather than contradicting each other. While the DIY aesthetic of the album gets a little choppy at times (“Mooste” sounds a bit like it was never quite finished) overall the album ties together nicely.
Like any record, Nukkuu has a time and a place. These are not, for instance, the songs to break out for your next keg party (unless said kegger is happening in an enchanted forest and you have only invited Wiccans). Perhaps since Lau Nau created the tunes in the confines of solitude, they are best listened to in a similar fashion. There is a starkness to the music that lends itself to a walk in the woods, the empty plain, or even the open road. If you choose to listen alone though, just make sure it doesn’t get dark before “Jouhet.” Under the wrong circumstances, that song can downright freak your shit out.
Jon Behm
November 17, 2008

I don’t know what kind of water they have running through the taps in Finland, or the greater Scandinavia as a whole for that matter, but I think it is about time that we had some of that fresh icy H2O diverted to these shores. Something about it - something which I can only assume really - must be utterly refreshing and beautiful, that is if quenching thirst can be beautiful. If you don’t quite know what I’m getting at, then Lau Nau (formally Laura Naukkarinen) is the perfect introduction. Nukkuu, her second solo album, is this metaphorical water personified, a kind of living water if can excuse the Christian connotations. The album is utterly refreshing, starkly beautiful and satisfying in the same way that you might imagine a pure mountain stream would be on a hot summer day. I know, the comparison is a bit much, but it is hard not to be hyperbolic. There is something absolutely transcendent about the album, something gorgeous, something untainted and pure, something. It may not be easy to identify the otherworldly spiritual undercurrent that Lau Nau has coaxed into her recordings, but there are definitely identifiable ingredients to the success of this album. First and foremost must be the voice. Lau Nau’s vocal delivery is enchanted, child-like and pastoral. I don’t know what language she is singing in so lyrics are a non issue, only pure angelic tones. The effect of her voice is actually not all that dissimilar to some of our American Sirens out of the northwest like Grouper and Inca Ore, though her associations with Islaja and Kuupuu might be a better starting point. However, for my money, Lau Nau reaches loftier heights on Nukkuu than most have in the whole of their recorded output. The instrumentation is key as well. Various plucked and bowed instruments mix with what I can only assume are instruments from the communal musical toy box of Finland. It is a perfect fit to the otherworldly/child like/pastoral feel I was talking about earlier. In fact, this is probably the reason why I prefer Nukkuu to other albums of similar ilk (though, I love 'em all). Oh, and just as a little qualifier (if you haven't figured it out already), this stuff is weird, but weird is often the most beautiful and you won’t find anything much more oddly beautiful than this browsing the pages of FG.
Mr. Thistle

Lau Nau's Kuutarha was one of the first releases from the Finnish underground to reach these shores in decent quantities, thanks to the keen ears of Chicago's Locust Music. Despite the flood of Fonal releases we've been able to get our hands on since, this second album still finds Lau Nau in a world of her own. While comparisons with the likes of Islaaja are guaranteed, Lau Nau's dishevelled songwriting comes from a more openly tuneful, traditional source. Using a variety of ramshackle acoustic instruments, from creaky old guitars to decrepit violins and tape-manipulated music boxes, Lau Nau fashions a blissfully intimate forty minutes of music. At its most simple and elegant, Nukkuu can survive almost exclusively on vocals, with the likes of 'Maapahkinapuu' deriving its entire melodic focus from a one-woman, multitracked choir, while harps and backwards-looping bells quiver and bristle in support. Embarking on a brief foray outside her acoustic comfort zone, Lau Nau lays down some acidic guitar fuzz on 'Lahtolaulu' halfway through the album, functioning as an unusually abrasive palate cleanser. It's on the quietest pieces that you really get a sense of what she does best though: album closer 'Vuoren Laelle' is a lovely, dilapidated lullaby for voice and piano that just about sums up everything that makes this consummately lo-fi, homespun music so special. Highly Recommended.

"Manages to take a million-and-one risks while keeping things subtle, understated, aesthetically intriguing, and emotionally resonant." -- Pitchfork
"Much like the stateside phenomenon that has been questionably labeled `New Weird America,' the current folk and psych scene that has cropped up over the last few years in Finland spreads its wings over a variety of sounds, textures, and styles ranging from the noise freakouts and mantra-like drone minimalism of groups like Avarus to more straightforward, singersongwriter based material such as the aforementioned Kiila. Naukkarinen's work falls somewhere in between these two extremes, segueing effortlessly between abstract experimentation and gorgeously delicate folk harmonies." -- Dusted
"Finnish folkster Laura Naukkarinen (Lau Nau) arrives just in time for the freak-folk craze, though her particular freak flag flies truer because she's an outsider--she hails from a close group of Finnish musicians. Kuutarha is heavy on weird vocal interplay and light on audibility. Listen extra closely and you'll hear an artist who's begging to be heard ... seemingly not of this world, yet very much grounded in its ancient sounds." -- Splendid
"This new offering from the Finnish clan is a smattering of gentle melodies cloaked in the shambolic memories of the first buds of spring ... something that transcends language and culture." -- Foxy Digitalis

Lau Nau or Laura Naukkarinen, (born 1980) is a singer-songwriter and musician from Helsinki, Finland. She is also a member of free improv and psych folk bands Kiila, Päivänsäde, the Anaksimandros, Avarus, Maailma, and the trio Hertta Lussu Ässä formed by fellow acid folk singer-songwriters Islaja and Kuupuu.
She's credited as playing anything from "colorful juice glasses" and "witch laugh megaphone" to "beer cans". She played on the 2008 edition of the State-X New Forms Festival.
Lau Nau lives in the Finnish countryside of Västanfjärd with her husband and son.