Arttu Silvast (Finland) – A Shoreline (single/sample track from the album Isthmus)

Indie. Ambient. Minimalist. Those are the three adjectives we’ve come to recognise and expect in the work of Finland’s neoclassical composer Arttu Silvast.

If I was doing the marketing for him his tag would be @iamarttu.

But enough of that. After an absence of just over a year he has returned with an album, ‘Isthmus’, which he says is inspired by Northern European landscapes and the Faroe Islands, and which evokes nature’s beauty and the vastness of human emotion.

Funnily enough we had a Faroe Islands band only the other night, an experimental one that released a concept album dealing with political issues with the Danish government over self rule. Politics apart, while I’ve never been there I can appreciate just from the photographs how its sheer cliffs and pounding waves can inspire.

But there is more to it than that as you might expect from a deep thinker. ‘Isthmus’ also has a sociological/political bent too, highlighting cultural contrasts between the east and the west.

I’m not sure if he means the east and west of Finland or the generic east and west. If it’s the latter that’s always easier for a Finn, especially if they live in the east of the country, which is never far from the Russian border.

I opted for a track from the album that was a single release only a week ago, ‘A shoreline’. The album features an unholy trinity of a 1952 Finnish-made Fazer upright piano, the ancient tones of the Finnish jouhikko (a bowed lyre), and a Moog synthesizer.

Last night we had a Swedish band that used an ancient Korg T3, which sounds like something out of the ‘Terminator’ franchise. It’s so good to hear artists making use of unusual instruments.

The track is split into two sections. The first sees the jouhikko prominent; at least I think that’s what it is. It vaguely has the sound of a didgeridoo and the flavour of the section is Celtic; a windswept island in the Orkneys perhaps (which is well on the way to the Faroes).

The second section is entirely different and could be something suitably mesmeric that Brian Eno wrote for Space 1999 or 2001 – A Space Odyssey, with smatterings of air traffic control conversations thrown in.

In the latter part the piano enters and its tone is noticeably different, other wordly.

I’ve listened to this sort of ambient, usually mainly electronic music on many occasions and been to multi-artist live shows that lasted for hours.

But there is something about Arttu Silvast that stands him out from his peers. It may be his penchant for curious instrumentation, but I reckon it’s more to do with the fact that his sound is always cinematic and never formulaic. Some of those peers would probably have made a meal of the opening section of ‘A Shoreline’ and stuck with it for the full five minutes rather than opt for a dramatic contrast.

I’ve been thinking about a piece of cinema that this track would fit well but I’ve been reluctant to reveal it because I know I’ve referenced it before and I hope it wasn’t for another piece by Arttu.

If you’ve seen the film Contact, one that is stuffed to the gills with metaphor and allegory and in which Jodie Foster is blasted into space to the star Vega’s planetary system to meet aliens that are trying to make contact with us, and ends seemingly up on a beach in a fuzzy world where she meets her deceased father, except he isn’t, he’s just a hologram created by the aliens to make her feel at ease, then this is the music for it.

‘Isthmus’ is released on November 15th.

Arttu Silvast will debut Isthmus live at the prestigious Les Boréales festival in Caen, Normandy, France, alongside past luminaries such as Arvo Pärt, Ólafur Arnalds, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Find him on:

Website: https://www.arttusilvast.com/music