Behind The Scenes with: Aki Yli-Salomäki & Kreeta-Julia Heikkilä
In this week's blog post we head behind the scenes with Finnish artists Aki Yli-Salomäki and Kreeta-Julia Heikkilä, the composer and violinist behind Modern Classical album Viriää, their beautiful debut for Whitelabrecs. Once again, Ryan Watts (AKA Akira Film Script) takes the interviewer's chair, giving us the opportunity to delve deeper into the ideas, sounds and creative process behind the album.
Throughout the interview, Aki and Kreeta-Julia discuss how their shared musical connection grew from the contemporary classical scene, and how strings and electronics came together to shape Viriää. They explore the intimacy of recording the album from a living room, the role of improvisation and listening, subtle field recordings, the meaning behind the Finnish track titles, and the delicate dialogue between violin, viola and electronics.
The conversation also touches on the album's artwork by Bob Burnett, musical influences, their respective listening habits, and what lies ahead - including the possibility of bringing Viriää into a live setting and further collaborations between the two!
Scroll down to read the full interview, where you'll also find photographs and an embedded Bandcamp player. As always, at the bottom of the page you'll find links to learn more about Aki and Kreeta-Julia, and to listen to Viriää for yourself, if you haven't done so already...
Hey Aki & Kreeta-Julia! Thank you both for taking time out of your schedules to chat with me about all things Viriää, your debut joint album on Whitelabrecs. Can you please both start by introducing yourselves; maybe give us a bit of your personal musical journeys, and what brought you both to the inception point of collaborating for Viriää?
Aki: I work as a composer, creating contemporary classical music for the concert stage alongside electroacoustic and ambient music. For me, composing is less about writing notes than about shaping sound, space and time.
Looking back, it all began decades ago through playing and exploring different kinds of music. Quite quickly, composing became the most natural way for me to express musical ideas, and I've followed that path ever since.
Kreeta-Julia and I got to know each other through the contemporary classical music scene. As we talked more about music, it became clear that we shared a similar way of listening and thinking about sound. Viriää grew from that shared curiosity - not from a fixed plan, but from exploring how acoustic strings and electronics could breathe and evolve together.
Kreeta-Julia: I am Kreeta-Julia Heikkilä and I work as a concertmaster at the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and also teach violin and chamber music at the Sibelius Academy.
In addition to these monthly paid jobs, I enjoy creating new things, such as producing festivals, concert series, cross-artistic productions, performing new music, recording and commissioning works.
In addition to Finland, I have worked and lived abroad, for example in London and Copenhagen, but the beautiful nature of Finland has been one of the reasons for returning to my small homeland.
I have acted as the artistic director of Minimalia - minimalist concert series since 2017 and I got to know Aki, since he has an exceptionally wide expertise in minimalist and ambient music. He has been a kind of mentor to me in the scene of these genres and still is. I also respect him as a composer and I have played a lot of his chamber music before making the Viriää album.
Thanks for sharing that all with us! It's really wonderful to speak with folks from a deeper classical background as many of us in the space came to it through other music avenues like rock-based and electronic-based backgrounds and bands.
The violin and viola are front and center across the album, however there’s a steady undercurrent of electronic sound - bit of a ‘what came first, chicken or the egg’ question, but where did these sessions begin? With the electronics or the stringed instruments? And who was at the helm of the strings vs. the electronics? Were these done in-person, or were these remote recording sessions at a distance?
Aki: The pieces came together in slightly different ways, but the electronic layer almost always provided the starting point and the overall framework. In many cases, parts of the electronic texture already existed in the notated score, so moving back and forth between the written violin part and the evolving electronic soundscape became one of the most interesting - and challenging - aspects of the process.
One of my aims was to preserve the acoustic presence of the violin. Rather than placing it deep inside a huge wash of reverb, I wanted it to remain close, nuanced and intimate.
By the time Kreeta-Julia joined the project, I already had a first demo version of the whole album. We refined it many times from there, and I also composed a few new pieces along the way, but the overall framework was already well established.
Although there were written parts, I wanted to move as far away as possible from the traditional classical workflow and work more by listening. Kreeta-Julia explored different ideas and improvisational approaches, and we usually worked using a “main take plus patches” approach, combining complete performances with carefully chosen details.
All of the recordings took place in my living room using my own equipment. Originally, the idea was simply to make demos there before moving into a studio, but quite quickly we realised: this already sounds right. Recording at home also gave us complete freedom to work without time pressure or fixed studio schedules.
I have to say the home recording approach was a success, and the intimacy with which you recorded the strings translates across the album in spades. As well, each piece feels very conversational, albeit a very relaxed conversation, which gives the whole affair a bit of a Jazz-like ethos; was this conversation between violin/viola intentional with the electronics, or did the conversation form as the recordings came together?
Aki: Creating a natural coexistence between the violin and the electronic sound world was very much a conscious goal from the beginning.
I also wanted Viriää to be experienced as a complete journey rather than a collection of individual tracks. The order of the pieces was carefully considered so that each one would lead naturally into the next. Some pieces are built around the melodic qualities of the violin, while in others timbre or electronic texture takes the lead. I also wanted to broaden the album’s emotional and musical landscape with a few pieces that move away from the slow, floating atmosphere towards something a little more rhythmic or energetic.
For me, listening has always been the most important part of composing. Every detail is carefully considered, but listening is what ultimately guides those decisions. I think that attitude also shaped the dialogue between the strings and electronics. They leave space for one another instead of competing for attention.
Kreeta-Julia: My goal as a musician is always to structure and express music in a way that speaks to the listener. Either so that the tone and resonance of the sound tells about the mood or feeling, or so that the musical phrase is like a spoken sentence.
Sometimes the sentence is declarative, sometimes interrogative. Often both aspects are present in music, both the structure of the sentence and the colour of the sound. This should create a musical dialogue between the musician and the listener. And if there are several musicians in the song, a musical conversation also takes place between the players.
On this album, the other musicians are electronics and overlapping violin/viola tracks. It's nice to hear that some kind of conversational connection is conveyed to the listener as well.
Yes, as a listener, the conversation across the album is very prominent. Kreeta-Julia mentions the electronics being "the other musicians" on the album; on that note, and geeking out a bit on gear, what was the recording and electronics setup like for the album? Any hardware or VST units or effects that played a big role in shaping the album’s sound?
Aki: I don’t tend to think about equipment very much while composing. For me, it’s simply there to serve the music. Most of the electronic side was created with software instruments and processing, alongside a little analogue synthesis, although that played a relatively small role on this particular release.
The strings were recorded with a stereo microphone pair in my living room. I was looking for something that felt intimate, present and human - something that sat between the polished precision often associated with classical recordings and the more distant, immersive aesthetic of ambient music.
More than any particular piece of equipment, what really mattered was having the freedom to experiment and take our time.
It's amazing you speak about less gear and taking more time, especially nowadays where lots of gear can take center stage, sometimes even over the user's abilities or levels of talent, all in the name of being the first to get something released from the new builds.
On a deeper listen through Viriää, I felt like I was hearing field recordings or some forms of musique concrète playing into some of the compositions; did my ears deceive me, or are there artifacts from recordings being used, or intentional inclusion of some delicate field recordings in some of the compositions?
Aki: Your ears didn’t deceive you. There are indeed some field recordings woven into the album, although they’re used very subtly. I never intended them to stand out as recognisable sounds. Instead, they’re there to become part of the musical fabric and gently blur the line between acoustic instruments, electronics and the surrounding environment.
I’ve been making field recordings for many years, and some of them have found their way into my music after being processed in different ways. For example, the second piece, Melonta, includes recordings I made while kayaking. Apart from those kinds of self-made recordings, I didn’t use any pre-existing sound libraries or ready-made elements. I enjoy building the sonic world from material that has a personal connection to the music.
I love that - proprietary fields are always the way to go in my book, especially nowadays where just about anyone who cares to can take up the practice of field recording with devices they already own, like iPhones or Androids, just to name a few; heck, some people may be reading this very conversation on one of these devices right now and not know they have the world of field recordings right in their hand!
Would either of you care to elaborate a bit on the album’s concept, reasons for Finnish names for the tracks, and what some of them mean when translated either directly or conceptually into English?
Aki: The word Viriää suggests a moment when something begins to awaken or take shape. It’s not a dramatic transformation, but a quiet sense that movement has started. That felt like a natural title for the album, because many of the pieces inhabit exactly that kind of space between stillness and change.
The Finnish titles aren’t really meant to be translated literally. I tend to think of them as small openings into the music rather than explanations of it. One of the things I love about the Finnish language is that many words carry several meanings at once, allowing different associations to exist side by side.
For example, Suuntaa can suggest both moving towards something and showing direction. Ainoa, which sits at the centre of the album, refers both to the solitary role of the violin and to a sense of singularity. Usvaantuu describes something gradually dissolving into mist, much like the violin itself gradually merges into the surrounding harmony. Liian varhain was written after hearing that an old friend, with whom I shared the beginning of my own musical journey, had passed away before the age of fifty.
Keeping the titles in Finnish also felt important to me. Language carries cultural memory, history and a particular way of seeing the world. Referring to Finnish landscapes or states of mind through another language would somehow have felt less authentic. For a long time, contemporary classical music has often preferred English, French or Italian titles as a sign of internationalism. I don’t really see it that way. If the music has something personal to say, I believe it can reach listeners regardless of the language used for the titles.
Kreeta-Julia: As Aki already said, Finnish words can be very ambiguous and even a bit cryptic. The word "viriää" is often also used to describe a smouldering fire or a fire whose flame is growing. I experience a similar mechanism in the creation of sound resonance. It cannot be forced, but it can be enabled. Once the hair of a violin bow touches a metal string, friction is created, which vibrates (”viriää”) the timbre of the sound. Both fire and sound need oxygen!
This already went beyond the question, but this perhaps also explains why we ended up giving the album this title.
I think going that deep around it all is fascinating, and not only because of multiple meanings in each title/word, but as Aki pointed out, it would be odd to try to convey Finnish ideals and subtlety via English, Italian, or French translations - not unlike how the Japanese have a single word for a concept that would require a small paragraph to fully explain in English; it just loses the special power imbued in the words as they're extrapolated in ways they were never meant to be.
You’ve now worked with the wonderful photographer Bob Burnett for the cover art to Viriää, what about his image you selected grabbed your attention, and did you find a direct correlation between his image of a bird in flight and the conceptual notion of this album?
Aki: What drew me to Bob Burnett’s photograph wasn’t so much the bird itself, but the sense of openness, the colour palette and the blurred movement. It feels suspended between stillness and motion, which resonates strongly with the atmosphere of the album.
A single image can never fully represent all the musical dimensions of an album, nor should it try to. I think its role is to create a first impression, to gently tune the listener’s expectations before the music begins. Sometimes that also leaves room for unexpected discoveries - perhaps someone expects one kind of musical world from the cover and then discovers something quite different once they start listening.
I like that kind of dialogue between image and music. They don’t need to explain one another; it’s enough that they invite the listener into the same world.
Kreeta-Julia: Honestly, choosing the album cover was a surprisingly slow and difficult process for me personally. Not because there weren't any beautiful images available, but because it's hard to put yourself in the shoes of an outsider and see the result of the whole process with new eyes.
There is so much music available and accessible that it's not always possible to comprehend it. How do you choose an image that stands out positively, arouses interest, sticks in your mind and at the same time tells about the album's content? What colours and images come to mind when you listen to the music? And does it ultimately matter much, because it's just your own personal experience? Someone else may experience the same thing completely differently.
However, I'm happy with this beautiful end result. I love birds and birdwatching is kind of my hobby, and I think the image has the same natural movement and airiness that Aki's music represents. Thank you Bob for that amazingly beautiful shot!
Personally, I love how intimate the photo is in its framing, as well, it feels representative of the bird's blur reflecting the vibrations of the strings across the record in their intimate, close-up setting. With that said, and spatial intimacy being so prevalent on the album, was there some form of influence, either an artist (audio, visual, etc.) or specific body of work from an artist that inspired your approach to this record?
Aki: For me, atmosphere and the overall experience always come first. A single sound, or even the smallest nuance, can completely change the character of a musical moment. It’s often less about the sound itself than where it appears, how long it remains, and what surrounds it.
I’m also interested in using silence, although it wasn’t the central focus of this album. Even so, the violin phrases are often separated by clear breathing spaces. Creating a sense of openness and allowing space around the music has always been important to me.
In the end, composing often feels like bringing together continuity, tiny observations and small discoveries in a way that gradually becomes something personal and emotionally meaningful. That’s probably the strongest influence behind this album, more than any individual artist or musical work.
Well stated.
Any plans to support the album with live dates or an in-person listening party in or around Europe coming up? Any live shows for either of you outside of this album?
Aki: I’d very much like to bring this music into a live setting. Nothing is confirmed at this stage, but it’s certainly something we’re thinking about.
If it happens, the right venue will be just as important as the performance itself. This music benefits from an intimate space where listeners can settle into the sound and its small details.
Kreeta-Julia: I’d very much like to bring this music into a live setting. Nothing is confirmed at this stage, but it’s certainly something we’re thinking about.
If it happens, the right venue will be just as important as the performance itself. This music benefits from an intimate space where listeners can settle into the sound and its small details.
Sounds like you both have the perfect idea and setting to present this set appropriately! I'm hopeful you can make it a reality; the album completely deserves it.
We’re constantly sharing what we’re listening to, and what inspired us, within the Inner Echo community. Any die-hard classic albums to share from either of your listening journeys over the years? And, what are you both personally listening to nowadays?
Aki: I listen to an enormous amount of music every year, partly because of my work, but also simply for the enjoyment of discovering new things.
Since composing often means spending long hours in front of a computer, I try to balance that by doing much of my listening outdoors. For years now, headphones and long walks have become an important part of my listening routine. I find that movement changes the way I hear music. It gives me time to absorb new ideas and return to my own work with fresh ears.
My own journey into music originally began with metal, and it has remained an important part of my listening ever since. I still spend a lot of time listening to very aggressive, dark and extreme music. My own compositions may sound completely different, but I don’t see those worlds as opposites. They simply represent different sides of who I am as a listener and as a person. It’s also a musical world I can draw inspiration from whenever I choose.
As for albums that have stayed with me over the years, I’d probably mention Solaris (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Cliff Martinez, In the White Silence by John Luther Adams, And Their Refinement of the Decline by Stars of the Lid, Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt, and Country by Niels Rønsholdt.
One of the things I’ve especially enjoyed in recent years is discovering new artists through the Whitelabrecs catalogue. That was actually one of the main reasons I first approached the label myself.
Kreeta-Julia: My work as an orchestral musician involves studying, listening to and playing a huge amount of classical orchestral music. That's probably partly why I currently relax best when listening to other kinds of music. I like Nordic folk music, film music, minimalist ambient and also high-quality soul/pop music and mixtures of these.
Due to my own projects, I have been listening to a lot of new folk music recently from bands such as Tsuumi Sound System and Dreamers Circus.
I admire the productivity of contemporary Icelandic composers and, in addition to Ólafur Arnalds, I listen a lot to Gabriel Ólafs, Sigur Ros and Ásger.
Max Richter's The Blue Notebook is a great minimalist album to mention.
Among pop artists, I would mention the Danish Tina Dico and Laura Mvula, both of whom have also recorded with a large orchestra.
While there are some familiar names in there for many of us, lots of new things to explore too! Thank you for sharing those with us!
So, what’s on the horizon for you both? Any plans to work together again soon? Any other individual releases or collabs to speak of in the near future? And if so, where should we look to for them?
Aki: I’m currently in the middle of updating my studio, including a new computer and some other equipment.
Alongside that, I’m continuing to work on new ambient music under my Osa7029 alias, while also composing new chamber and orchestra music for concert purposes. This autumn we’ll be recording a new large-scale work for string quartet with synthesizers and electronics. Kreeta-Julia is also part of the quartet, so our collaboration will continue there as well.
And beyond that, I’d be very happy to continue exploring the musical world of Viriää together. I have a feeling there’s still plenty of musical ground left for us to explore.
Finally, thank you, Ryan, for such thoughtful questions. It was a pleasure to reflect on the album and the ideas behind it.
Kreeta-Julia: I will be performing at the Turku Music Festival in August, where several interesting projects will have their premieres. Now on Saturday 1 August I will be performing Terry Riley's new work The Holy Liftoff together with a string quartet and flutist Claire Chase.
Later in August my own production, Archipelago Stories by Finnish cinematic composer Mari Sainio, will also have its world premiere in Turku. I have commissioned this piece of work from her to be arranged for a piano quintet and a sound artist, and filmmaker Lauri Danska to make a film adaptation of the Finnish archipelago.
In September I am also looking forward to a challenge to act as the violinist-leader of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, when we play a concert without a conductor.
As Aki already mentioned, we will be recording his new production for string quartet and electronics next autumn.
Next spring I will be playing as a soloist with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and I am also looking forward to concerts with my own piano trio.
There are other commissioned works and a new album in the works, but I'll only tell you about them when the time comes.
Thank you, Ryan, for a delightful chat!
We hope you enjoyed this interview! To explore more about the artists, you can follow the links below...
Aki
Kreeta-Julia
'Viriää' is available in a limited repress of 100 vinyl-effect CDrs, as well as a digital options in a range of high quality formats. You can take a listen to the album in full HERE!
