Under the Weather, Beating the Odds
A Helsinki Dérive, Part Five
A gloriously sunny Sunday afternoon, Töölö, Helsinki. The Relove second hand shop has (for me) some of the essentials of life: a delightful affogato and wi-fi. We had a later than usual start from the Airbnb, Nancy feeling under the weather with coughs and aches, me feeling the superposition of jet lag and vacation mode.
THE aspirational goal today is to try to squeeze into a Lau Nau performance at an art gallery this afternoon. It’s a free event that was announced three weeks ago with a cap of 35 attendees. Needless to say by the time we found out, the signups had been claimed, so we’re banking on being able to get there early enough to get one of the non-reserved spots.
Odds aren’t good, but on the other hand, I’ve seen Laura a number of times (and Nancy’s done so even more than I), with the most memorable of those performances being at the Turku city library around this time last year. So, personally it’s less about being able to attend a performance by probably my favorite electronic/experimental artist and more about witnessing the benign absurdity of this free event.
Incidentally, [redacted] is the bathroom code. The things you pick up simply by listening.
Nancy is soldiering on, dutifully perusing Relove’s racks of relics after having scanned the UFF across the road. Before snagging this perch of bandwidth, ice cream, and coffee I had the most delightful experience talking the ears off the poor pharmacist who hooked us up with the other essentials: cough medicine, cough drops, and ibuprofen. Drug store taxonomies seem to be universal: cold remedies and analgesics cohabiting the same shelves as they would in the US. Brand names may be local; names of molecules bridge the language gaps.
Getting sick on vacation is one of those mishaps that get minimized as an incidental bummer or maximized as a trip-defining event. Fortunately I seem to reserve my dates with the “ick” for home, although the memorable exception of being under the weather was during my first trip to London when I managed to pick up a bug and spent a good part of the time being hopped up on cold meds in the hotel. Memory is less like a chain of links and more like a gashapon machine randomly dispensing an episode in a capsule.
A variation of the “pregnant woman syndrome” where when you’re in a family way, you notice everyone else who’s expecting: when your wife has the coughs and sniffles, you notice everyone else who’s got a bug. The incidental plosives suddenly become the most important FX in your soundscape, punching through the clatter and scrapes of used dishes being organized and open chairs being positioned by the ladies who lunch, or “naiset, jotka lounastavat” as Google translated (and in all likelihood missed the idiom). Perhaps it's only lost in translation when you suspect it being filtered out on the other end.
”Kiitos palljeon,” I beamed at the person who brought over the affogato and worked the thick, dark espresso over the ice cream and berries. “Munki ja kahvi,” I asked earlier at the counter of the Fazer Cafe earlier. And that’s where the wheels fell off my Finnish. The pharmacist was perceptive and gracious in noticing and acknowledging my clueless tourist looks; that slight befuddlement seasoned with embarrassment works as well as an MMORPG nameplate that reads “Amerikkalainen.”
Nancy finds me at my corner of the cafe, keyboard and affogato unashamedly on display, and the overheard bathroom code comes in handy. I order her a slice of chanterelle quiche topped with fresh blueberries and slip her some ibuprofen. It’s less than two hours until the Lau Nau show, and even Nancy’s acknowledging the long odds; I still have yet to convince her of the comedy, but I have time.
An hour and a half before the performance, Nancy gets a message from Laura: no one's lining up just yet. Hope beckons as we navigate to the venue, Taidekoti Kirpilä, a literal residence serving as an art gallery. We manage to coattail behind a local who gets us past the front door, up the elevator, into the apartment, and facilitates getting tickets numbers three and four for the event.
“Art house,” is the literal translation of the venue, a private residence serving as a public space presenting the owner’s immense collection of paintings and sculptures that span the past century and then some. You doff your shoes like proper Finns and pad from room to room, connecting the dots between the laminated catalog for each chamber with the works on the wall. Time starts rhyming with the portraits and busts as everything slows to a comfortably anticipatory tempo. We get to say hi and chat a bit with Laura; it blows my mind that she and Nancy are friends.
Lau Nau might very well be the only electronic performer who requires 2 liters of water for their stage setup, as a large glass bowl with a submerged microphone provides the sound sources for the opening and closing pieces of a continuous, dream-like set of chimes, drones, and cascading tones, the latter emerging from a modular synthesizer like numinous ribbons of sound, twisting and merging into braids not unlike a chorus of church organs extruding intertwining arpeggios. Interludes of field recordings, creaking and ticking, gently harmonize with the oscillating air conditioner on the wall, and we emerge gently from the waters. I realize I’m in full-on All Music Guide purple prose fanboy mode, and that’s okay.
We hang around until the venue (feels weird calling a posh apartment that, although we did essentially attend a house show) closes and are gently nudged out, but before then we meet and chat with Mikhail and Paulina, fellow enthusiasts of the “weird Finnish folk of the 00’s,” sharing moments of musical epiphany from the Fonal Records catalog. And speaking of that label, Merja Kokkonen of Islaja is in attendance, she and Laura catching up as the modular rig is unplugged and tucked away. There’s a “solo improv snare drum” performance happening on Wednesday, and a friend of Nancy’s who runs a record label will be bringing a batch of cassettes and other artifacts for her.
As we make our way back to the tram stop, I realize just how comfortable my feet feel after having been without my hiking boots for the previous two hours. It’ll be time for another dose of ibuprofen and cough syrup for Nancy, and for all our anxieties of missing a show I have a portfolio of memories, two more names of friends to file away, and the reminder that gentle absurdities make for the best comedies.