an impressive album, not just because it’s beautiful, (though it is), but because it feels so different from any other solo piano recording out there.
Bark At Your Owner
Antti Lähdesmäki – Solo Piano
WE TEND TO HELP EACH OTHER OUT HERE, by Antti Lähdesmäki is an impressive album, not just because it’s beautiful, (though it is), but because it feels so different from any other solo piano recording out there. Lähdesmäki is a Finnish pianist, and his playing is quiet, open, and lyrical in a way that might remind you of Bobo Stenson, Tord Gustavsen, or even Paul Bley. But he’s not just following in their footsteps. There’s something a little messier here — more like a sketch than a finished painting. And that’s what helps make it special.
The pieces are short –they don’t build toward big dramatic payoffs — they settle into a feeling and stay. You think they’re going in one direction, and then they don’t. Some are gentle and meditative; others carry a quiet tension. Lähdesmäki likes to let the edges show. Sometimes that’s where the magic is.
‘I Have a Fire That Never Burns Out’ is warm, persistent, opening the album with a steady flicker –you can almost hear the logs shifting in the grate, next to Lähdesmäki’s piano. A pine cone bursts and pops into sparkles; another chord, a playful one. He’s not pushing the music forward so much as following it, letting it lead. The fire never rages, but it never fades either, and it never goes out.
‘Femton Grader’ (fifteen degrees Celsius) is about a man in Sweden who strips off all his clothes and dives into a cold lake, then shouts the water temperature like it’s part of some local ritual. Lähdesmäki’s piano captures the scene with quiet humor and soft-spoken awe. The choppy, repeated phrases echo the stubborn rhythm of a swimmer in icy water — not particularly smooth, but determined.
Lähdesmäk wrote ‘Rain Is the Most Violent Scream of Them All’ during a snowless winter in Finland, when the rain cut cold to the bone, and the darkness settled even deeper. The piece holds grief and weight — you can feel it in the pacing, the ache in the chords, and the way the melody seems to search for something it never quite finds. “There’s a key in this grand piano that’s shouting in agony,” he wrote. You can hear it.
‘Lintukoto, Pt. 1’ draws from Finnish mythology — the home of the birds, a peaceful, blissful place where they fly for the winter, and where souls go after death to be renewed. The music is dreamlike and minimalist, with the same kind of searching lyricism and quiet flow you might hear in one of Keith Jarrett’s solo improvisations. “A waterbird once laid an egg which became the world: the home of my ancestors, the world of frozen forests and lakes,” Lähdesmäki wrote.
‘A Lonely Cricket in an August Night’ is more about stillness than story. You can sense the setting: a remote lake in Southern Sweden, no distractions, thick summer air, fireflies blinking in the dark. Lähdesmäki captures that kind of quiet with sparse, unhurried phrases and long pauses that feel like they’re listening — like they’re waiting for a single cricket to sing into the warm, silent night.
This is Lähdesmäki’s first solo piano recording, but he’s no newcomer. Born in 1990 in Äänekoski, Finland, he’s become a restless and dynamic presence in the Scandinavian jazz scene — just as comfortable improvising on a church organ in Norway as he is writing for a big band back home. He’s part of several groups, including PAD Trio, Grind 3, New Borders, and Mumriq, and his work often pulls from avant-garde, jazz-rock, and free improvisation. You get the sense he’s always listening for the next idea, whether it’s on a stage in Copenhagen or in the woods outside Helsinki.
