The words are in my head. I know they are because that’s where I keep them all. But there’s a mysterious little system that passes them through a sifter and they fall out in a digestible sequence into sentences, even many sentences. Sometimes these sentences explain something, convey a feeling, tell a story, make a joke. Sometimes they write here, about music and other things. And sometimes the machine pauses and the words are held in suspension somewhere within, hesitated or possibly prevented from materialising even if the intent and desire is there.

I wrote, but it didn’t feel right. Then I tried again, and it said too little, then too much. The words come slowly, painfully, and the sentences even more so. Whole blocks of text typed and discarded, strained over, for so little ground gained as pixels inch their way stubbornly across the screen behind that cursed blinking line.

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I’ve been coming back to Olli’s pianos here quite a bit recently, because they demand nothing of me. Gentle, clear loops and not-quite-loops that nonetheless circle the same centre, chords emerging to ring in clear air with no insistence, to fall into places and shapes that evoke all of themselves.

The nearly 16 minutes of opener “Nurmettunut” (Grassy) comes and goes over the same small selection of chords, phasing in and out as it will to find new ways that are simply the same ways. Notes merely shake free and though the ground covered is the same, it’s never the quite exactly. Even as the record passes through its various guises and gentilities to build up to the more dynamic closer “Pelkkå valo” (Just Light), it retains a casual air, an easiness that defies resistance and allows the music contained within to come loose and just be.

That is the way of the album; in many ways that is the way of this place. I come back to you time and again with something new to say, though perhaps it’s not new at all. Just another version, another imagining of the same underlying musings in a different wrapper. And sometimes the steady rain of words comes from a deep and articulate place, and sometimes in the many unseen and unread moments between, it does not. They wait just the same.