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That Dark, Dark Night

by Simo Sakari Aaltonen

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I had always wanted to create a dark but also thrilling piece like “That Dark, Dark Night”.

Before I could, I needed to not only understand enough about rhythms, chords, chord voicings, and effects of individual chord changes but also have access to and enough experience with certain instruments.

This all came together only in recent years, and this, my second single, is the result. I had long looked forward to getting to play freely, with abandon, with many of the instruments heard here for the first time in my music — toy piano and fairground organ or calliope in particular.

I go further with organic development in this piece than in any of my previous works apart from the long culminating piece — “Love” for string orchestra — of An Iceland Symphony.

This is also among the new pieces with which I started composing works directly with the actual sounds that were going to be heard in the final results. This means that the exact sounds of these instruments were an integral shaping element of this work, affecting choices made at each step.

“That Dark, Dark Night” was released the same day as another single called “In the Fog, Deep”. These two works feature some of the same instruments and also have some emotional overlap, but whereas “In the Fog, Deep” has a clear outcome, “That Dark, Dark Night” can have no such clearcut ending.

Because even though the fortunate ones of us sooner or later make it out of that dark, dark night, it goes on even now for others — and perhaps waits for us too, sometime, somewhere. May we all, whenever we end up back in it, eventually find our ways through.

Yet even in darkness, thrills and beauty can exist, sometimes as an inextricable part of the whole experience. So here’s to that dark, dark night.

—Simo

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released February 29, 2024
Music, cover art, & liner notes © 2024 Simo Sakari Aaltonen. All rights reserved.

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Simo Sakari Aaltonen Finland

Finnish writer, composer, filmmaker, visual artist, and podcaster.

As well as his own books — such as At Dawn: Early Short Stories — he’s written for story-oriented video games, including the psychological horror hit Serena.

As a composer, he published his first large-scale musical work, An Iceland Symphony, in May 2021.

His podcast What Now with Simo is available in many places. ... more

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