This album features all the best finished pieces from the earliest of my first ten years of making music — the musical equivalent of my first book of short stories (At Dawn: Early Short Stories) and my first book of poetry (Land of Youth & Beauty: Early Poems).

As I was learning about every possible area of composition, instrumentation, and musical performance, the pieces range over a wide area of styles and approaches, from recorded acoustic flute music (“Turtle Morning”) to synthesiser pieces (“Finally” and others) to dreamy soundscapes (especially “Stream No. 1”) and everything in between.

A great amount of this music was improvised in one take on various virtual instruments. This was a discovery I was extremely grateful for when I found it to be true: that I could improvise. It’s a form of immediate, direct composition, and not everyone, even some highly skilled musicians, can do it. But Vangelis, for example, created all his music this way — he didn’t write music, he created everything by recording what he was playing.

I value above all art that speaks directly from the heart — like the music of Vangelis and Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch and Pierre Estève, or the stories of Ray Bradbury — and this is what I always aimed to do in these moments of improvisation, letting all feelings come through as directly as possible.

Many of these pieces feature on my music videos, which you can find on my YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/@SimoSakariAaltonen), and the text descriptions of those videos feature more background information and details.

1. “Turtle Morning” (0:53): Acoustic recording of an improvisation on an American Indian ponderosa pine flute handmade by Jonah Thompson, who is Diné (Navajo). An important element of American Indian flutes is the block, also called a totem or fetish, and the block on this flute is in the shape of a turtle.

2. “Finally” (1:48): Synthesiser improvisation.

3. “Iceland 2016” (1:21): Expressing the feelings of deep gratitude, happiness, and serene joy I felt on my first trip to Iceland, lasting more than a month and a half. This piece is featured in my music video of the same title. At the end we hear my recording of the eruption of the geyser at Geysir, Iceland and the crowd’s reaction.

4. “Snake Pattern” (3:09): Reaching back to ancient times of mysterious cave paintings and powerful glyphs. Featured in a video featuring my visual art.

5. “Channel at Night (Seeking the Light)” (1:40): From a dark time, the lonely winter before the most beautiful summer of my life so far and later that first trip to Iceland. The video featuring this music tells a short story about how life was for me at that moment.

6. “Foggy Day” (3:15): Featured in a video filmed on the foggiest day I’ve ever seen, the day after my friend Logan L. Masterson left this world. I remember thinking he would’ve loved to have been there to see it. The music has three parts: an intro, a fragile middle part, and the culminating section where the rest of the emotions flow out. Everything improvised.

7. “Double Rainbow” (1:41): In the summer before my first trip to Iceland, I saw the first double rainbow of my life, just outside the building where I was living at the time. I filmed a video of this beautiful, auspicious sight, and this music goes with that video.

8. “Flight to Iceland” (3:58): Expressing the rich mix of emotions I was feeling on this flight from Finland to Iceland: excitement, heightened alertness, sense of purpose, happiness, and more. It was my first-ever trip on a jet plane (previously I had flown on a small single-propeller plane), and before the trip I wondered whether I’d be nervous during the flight. It turned out I wasn’t at all. It was a beautiful, steady flight, and I loved all of it. The feeling when a plane suddenly picks up speed just before take-off is one of my favourite feelings in the world. The instruments reflect the subject: heavy low brass for the plane, light and weightless harp for the air. I filmed parts of this flight from my cabin window, and this video is on YouTube. The recording includes the sounds of the cabin on this very flight.

9. “Northern Lights in Kópavogur” (1:24): I saw a strong display of the aurora borealis from the beautiful apartment I was staying at in Kópavogur, Iceland. These were among the most meaningful, dreamlike days and nights of beauty of my whole life. Featured in a video showing what I saw. I believe the name of the town means “Seal Pup Bay”.

10. “Barbaric Splendour” (1:27): Featured in a video filmed at Geysir, Iceland. The title doesn’t refer to Iceland at all, but to an association that happened in my mind as I gazed on the views you see in the video: of times throughout history when musicians have been forced to make music for warmongering, barbaric rulers, even when it’s been the last thing they’ve wished to do. These despots are inhuman monsters: only a blackhearted subhuman could even think of doing violence in the midst of great natural beauty.

11. “Drive Home No. 1” (5:13): Featured in a dreamlike video of a long night drive down a dark, beautiful road in Iceland. This improvisation expresses serenity and many other feelings associated with this particular drive as well as night drives and drives home in general. I remembered the long night drives of my childhood when we were returning from seeing family in the south of Finland. The vibration of the car and the roar of the engine had a numbing effect that I aimed to replicate in this music. Featured first on this album is this gentler version, where this effect is lesser, though still there. See the end of the album for two alternative versions. The version featured in the video is the “Jarring Mist Version” — that title is explained below.

12. “City Grooving” (1:21): Playful free playing with sounds.

13. “Drive Home No. 2” (1:53): Another piece altogether, but associated with the same night drive. Featured in a video (not yet on YouTube) made from the same filmed material.

14. “Leaving Iceland” (0:37): Featured in a video showing the dawn view out the cabin window, above the clouds, on my flight away from Iceland. Far above we see momentarily the crescent of the moon.

15. “Paris Traffic” (1:56): I lived in Paris for several months at the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018. This piece is featured in a video filmed aboard Paris buses, the sounds of which you can also hear throughout. At the end the video rewinds back to a bus stop, only then turning from black and white to colour.

16. “Galeries Lafayette, Paris” (1:10): This is a place in Paris, and the view of its impressive ceiling inspired this trumpet piece.

17. “Tour Eiffel” (4:46): Featured in a video, filmed in a single take, of a walk towards the Eiffel Tower. Everything in this video came together magically and spontaneously, from the man seemingly saluting the tower just as we were walking past him, to the bird making a little spontaneous cameo of its own. The music, which I seem to recall being in C Lydian (a musical mode / scale), expresses the feelings of dreamlike serenity of these moments on this swimmingly hot day. The instruments again reflect the subject: the more mathematically structured metallic percussion for the wrought-iron tower, the flute for the air flowing all around and through the metal structure. “La Tour Eiffel” is French for “The Eiffel Tower”.

18. “Notre-Dame de Paris” (7:05): Featured in a video filmed spontaneously during a single short visit to Notre-Dame of Paris, only about a year and a half before the 2019 fire that destroyed the spire. The music is in three sections: 1) The drone and weight of centuries and history. 2) The middle section consisting of two different versions of the same musical material. The first version could be subtitled “Back Row, Hand in Hand” and the second version “Near the Organ”. 3) The final section familiar from elsewhere on this album, used here again because it fit perfectly — for several reasons — also this final part of the video. Churches give me mixed feelings, and part of why this ending felt right was that it was a relief to return from the weighty, dark interior to the fresh, bright morning air and the freedom of the outdoors with my traveling companion. The video was edited and timed to fit the music, rather than the other way around.

19. “Beautiful and Dark Times in France” (3:39): The title says everything needed, but to clarify, the beautiful times and the dark times were separate, not simultaneous. Times of the greatest happiness and other times of its opposite. Featured in a video with an entirely different title, “The Bird in the Tree”.

20. “Goodbye?” (2:13): Featured in a video showing the chessboard floor of Notre-Dame. The title should in fact be in quotation marks, as in the video and as though quoted speech, but quotation marks can be problematic in titles of digital files, so to be on the safe side, I didn’t use them here.

21. “Desolation” (1:59): Again the title says everything. Desolation is one of the worst feelings in the world. I wish no one ever had to bear its sometimes unbearable weight. The word refers to and encompasses abandonment, loneliness, and isolation.

22. “Memories No. 1” (1:18): Improvised in two parts, piano first, then strings. The piano part is of the kind that would be nearly impossible to create in musical notation, as the timings of the notes need to flow freely and between the lengths of mathematically precise notes. I believe I got these notes exactly the way they needed to be.

23. “Rain” (4:47): Sometimes I create pieces of music meant to encapsulate a single thing, all the major emotions associated with it, and in such a way that if those are the only pieces I ever create about those individual topics, it would be enough. Most important of these is the long string orchestra piece called “Love” from An Iceland Symphony. This piece, “Rain”, sought to do the same for rainy days. The rain — and the siren heard in the middle — were recorded from my window.

24. “Ripples” (3:10): After the long dark succession of pieces before this, suddenly light and freshness break through.

25. “Night of Desolating Realisations” (1:42): The title describes this sufficiently. Featured in a video, not yet on YouTube, where I was filming a night view near the Tampere channel when suddenly a city hare leapt past behind me and stopped a little way off, stayed still for some moments, then continued on its way. The video was serendipitous in many ways, including in there being a transparent glass or plastic enclosure next to me through which the hare could be seen disappearing down the path. If the structure hadn’t been transparent, the view of the hare would have been cut off the moment it started moving again.

26. “Kópavogur Rainbow” (1:30): Featured in a video. The picture is from a happy time, the music from a later unhappy one. Exactly where the rainbow ends, I happened to later live for a short time, but that was the opposite of finding treasure. A mistake.

27. “‘Ex Oblivione’ by H. P. Lovecraft (Reading)” (5:42): From a filmed reading of this beautiful short story or prose poem by Lovecraft. A single take. It would’ve been easy to edit out the verbal stumble at one point, but I believe in the idea of staying humble enough to keep some mistakes. Too perfect can sometimes be no longer human. This idea is expressed in an episode of Northern Exposure by a blind piano tuner who tells of how in times past some makers of carpets would always leave one imperfectly tied knot because otherwise the rug would be perfect. There’s perfect and then another type of perfect, and only one of those is good.

28. “An Arc” (3:46): An impressionistic mood sequence, the first multipart composition I ever made. The seven movements are: 1) 0:00–0:06: Intro. 2) 0:06–0:34: Avant (The Club). 3) 0:34–1:02: Venite. 4) 1:02–2:03: Intermezzo. 5) 2:03–3:00: Recitation (Backstage). 6) 3:00–3:26: Reprise. 7) 3:26–3:43 Outro (Pursued by —). This mysterious club weaves in and out of several of my compositions. In fact, it featured in a section of An Iceland Symphony I decided to remove from that work and make part of a series of short compositions called Northern Lights.

29. “Ill Omens” (1:29): As the title says.

30. “Anticipation” (0:52): Same with this.

31. “The Savage Blender” (1:54): Featured in a video. A piano improvisation using a mysterious and perhaps sinister musical scale.

32. “Earthworks” (1:49): Featured in a video of the street torn open at one corner of the block where I was living at the time.

33. “Amiss, Film Falls Apart, Mail-Order Piano” (2:45): Featured in a video using a few pieces of free vector art that I sabotaged in various ways. This was the only time I ever used free art like this, made by others. Since then, everything in my creative works has been my own. So for example, my music uses absolutely no ready-made patterns or loops, and every single element of my drawings (such as in my — currently incomplete — 3-part graphic novel You Never Know What You’ll See in the Haunted Garden) has been made by me from scratch, never using anything made by anyone else.

34. “Aquatic Dreams” (1:42): This synthesiser improvisation received a great appreciative comment from a stranger when I shared it on a music-makers’ forum back then. He said he found it “so damn atmospheric” and mentioned it immediately conjured up all kinds of impressions, such as a water level in a video game.

35. “A Minor Reverb” (4:20): The title has a double meaning: the reverb is not so minor, as it’s nearly endless, and the notes up until the very end are only those of the A minor chord: A, C, and E. I wanted to hear what a near-infinite A minor reverb would sound like. There’s also a video featuring this piece.

36. “Atmospheric Tests” (0:54): Heard here is the first synthesiser instrument I ever created from scratch, using basic waveforms manipulated and modulated in various ways.

37. “Ion Storm” (1:51): When I shared this piece on social media many years ago, a friend at the time commented it could easily be from an intellectual science fiction film from the 1970s. I loved hearing this comment, as for me the piece certainly conjured up panoramic high-altitude scenes of another planet, such as would fit perfectly the opening credits of such a film. Though meant entirely as a compliment, I wish to distance myself from the word “intellectual”, though. The greatest intelligence is intelligence of the heart, and that often has nothing to do with intellectuality.

38. “June Train” (2:14): I filmed the beginning of a train trip in Finland in June one year and in a moment of inspiration improvised this piece to go with it. Also part of the piece is the ambience of the train, including the high whine. The video is currently not on YouTube.

39. “Cello & Taiko” (1:52): As the title says. A composer friend at the time mentioned he could definitely hear a story in this music.

40. “Far Away Across the World” (2:22): Another composer friend described this piece as a nice gentle one.

41. “Goes Like This” (1:15): This improvisation on layered instruments is purely musical in the sense that it relates to no specific idea or impression. It is simply what happened when I started recording and, for me, communicates some enigmatic emotions. Ones probably best left behind once experienced.

42. “Painted Dreams” (1:34): Featured in a music video showcasing a street mural created by Hermann Sebastian Schultz. The story behind the video and this piece of music is told in the video description on YouTube.

43. “Abstract Omen” (0:38): Featured in a video. I wanted to create an abstract music video that would feature nothing recognisable or easily defined but would feel like it’s trying to communicate a message of some kind — a video that could be cool to find in an adventure game, for example, viewable on a screen using a projector in some mysterious location.

44. “Mildred’s Pizza” (0:57): Featured in a video. In the mid-2010s I created several often very dark pictures first as physical charcoal drawings, then photographed them, and then drew the colours out of the lighting of the photos — or at least this is how I saw this process I came up with. These drawings were inspired by a method mentioned by writer/artist Paul Chadwick in one of his Concrete comic books: drawing something quickly and straight out of the subconscious, with no censoring of whatever it might be. This drawing made me want to create a physical collage of items to depict the scene, and I even went to a crafts store and bought some items for that purpose. But later I realised it would be best to forget that and make a video instead. The title comes from the texts barely seen in the video (I recall the sentences coming to me in half-sleep as I was waking up — then I wrote them down): 1) “The Dryness of Mildred’s Pizza Gives Rise to Bad Dreams and Wicked Designs on a Cruel World.” 2) “She likes it that way.” (with a little flower next to it)

45. “Memory of Snow — Through the Woods” (2:56): Many, many years ago there was a happy moment when I went with someone outside a forest cabin at night in winter and made snow angels with her. This is part but not all of what inspired this piece and title. The idea of flying or rushing through the night winter woods is stirring to my imagination.

46. “Two Elderly Asian Gentleman Violinists Duel in the Sunlight” (2:01): This title was inspired by various very refreshing titles I had seen for various Asian pieces of music or other art. These titles would often be long and descriptive in a lovely, innocent way. I improvised both parts at the same time.

47. “Stream No. 1” (8:18): The first in a series of compositions that are like streams where anything can float past, coming and going. Once when listening to this when very tired, I felt suddenly worried about whether it was too mesmeric, as in that moment it had a strong hypnotic effect on me. Listened to when wide awake, probably this is much less likely to be the case.

48. “Drive Home No. 1 (Jarring Mist Version)” (5:12): This is the version of this piece used in the music video. Here the jarring effect of the sound of the car’s engine — suggested musically — is much stronger, simulating the feeling I remember from those childhood night drives. Sometimes perhaps a little headache would start, or if not a headache, certainly I’d lean my forehead against the cold window, where the condensation from our breaths — those of myself, my parents, and my siblings — would let me occasionally draw smiley faces. Two eyes and a smiling mouth. And once we saw a truly mystical mist hovering over some dark night fields we were driving past on our late journey home, and this is where that part of the title comes from.

49. “Beautiful and Dark Times in France (Rusted Metal Bird Version)” (3:41): Here I also prefer to let the title speak for itself.

50. “Drive Home No. 1 (In Safety We Drive to Eternity Version)” (5:09): A tender, vulnerable version of this piece. The notes are exactly the same, but the difference in instrumentation leads to different feelings. I hope this may close this album on a note of beauty, gratitude, and affection.

—Simo Sakari Aaltonen