Mikko Joensuu makes music in the tradition of luminaries such as Townes van Zandt and Leonard Cohen, lush human hymns which find glory and comfort not only in life itself but also the landscapes which will outlive us. After a period of self-imposed isolation in the wilderness of his native Finland, Joensuu emerged with a whole collection of songs which will now form the Amen Trilogy. As he describes in the press release:
“In the summer of 2012 I built a studio in a small cabin by a lake in northern Finland. I spent a month staring towards the lake, writing and recording. During that time I realized what I had was actually three different albums, all stemming from the same state of mind, expressing various sides to the same story.”
Our first taste of the work will be Amen 1, what Joensuu considers the “most fragile” part of the story. “It’s an effort to find balance between great sadness and beauty”, he continues, “to understand the very strange state when one’s mind is close to collapse and yet at the same time more alive than ever.” As if to prove this enticing, mysterious description, he has put out ‘Warning Sign’ as the first single, a track with all the delicate beauty of spun glass or maybe some intricate ice structure, conjured into being by the strange forces of nature. Lyrically, the song revolves around a narrator doomed to self-destructive repetition, a man caught within Einstein’s definition of insanity and tragically aware of if. Check out the video below, directed and edited by Ezra Gould with Osku Pulkkinen on camera:
Amen 1 is due for release on Svart Records on the 10th June. You can expect to see the subsequent parts (presumably Amen 2 and 3) in late 2016 and early 2017 respectively.