Travels in the North

...is the title of a little travel journal I found in a 2nd hand bookstore in Derbyshire. I knew of the author Karel Capek (1890-1938) because if his dystopian visions of the future (such as War with the Newts), a world with mass production, weapons of mass destruction, peopled by recalcitrant androids and robots (he is credited with inventing the word robot around 1920). But this book was quite different, and curiously absorbing, even if you don't much care frozen wastelands of the Far North. The author "travelled north beyond the arctic circle because he wanted to see at last the lands of his boyish dreams, and of his life-long friends, Kiergaard, Jacobsen, and the others, and also because of the silvery cool birch trees, the aconites, the moss, and the sparkling waters appeal to him strongly." It's full of eccentric characters, ecstatic descriptions of rock formations, icebergs, scant vegetation, and funny anecdotes.

Something he alludes to is the silence of the far north. Having just returned from Helsinki after a little tour of concerts of contemporary Finnish music with soprano Janneke Moes, I was struck too about how quiet everything is. Even in the city. It's a bit of a cliché about the Finns but you sense the silence of everyone's personal space more than the city soundscape. I get the impression of a very filtered listening experience going on. The sound environment is a superficial layer, blotted out...
There are lots of interesting sounds to be heard all around Helsinki. Here is a little remix of a jazz song written for Janneke, words by Teemu Suuntamaa - his English translation of his own poem, but he speaks a few words of the Finnish original, and some seabirds recorded early one morning...