I was about to write about this album, one of my all-time favorites, when I realized that I already had, just about a year ago when I first started expanding from interviews to essays. I was pleased to see that I was worse at it then than I am now; I hope this piece's archival/anthropological value outweighs the slight quality dropoff.

There’s a lot to be said for fog, although the most interesting bits have already been covered in a thousand words by Caspar David Friedrich. In music, the listener is fogged by sound’s refusal to be given any sort of form, or at least to buck its expected arrangement into familiar presentation. Nukkuu denies the audience a foothold in either lyrics or instrumentation, songs titled and sung only in Finnish (ignore the fact that for a large swath of Lau Nau’s audience, including anyone with a physical copy and the included English translation, this is in no way an obstacle to understanding the album) and backed by a combination of wind chimes and several string instruments being tuned before a performance – to beautiful effect. Her vocals are one part acapella Grouper and one part Bjork, particularly in terms of cadence. However, their effect is entirely distinct from atop the clearer (than the former), simpler (than the latter) bed of instruments upon which they lay. Each component operates relatively unchallenged within its own frequency window, the combination less an ambient cloud than a sky full of them. To a moron, it’s clear only that most of what is struck belongs in a folk museum somewhere. In this sense, I am a moron, though it’s comforting to discover that liner notes do occasional credit Lau Nau with things like mortar and colorful juice glasses.

Maybe Lau Nau is an unintentional, unexceptional ambassador of a broad Finnish scene that I’ve simply never discovered. It would be disappointing, in a way, because of the exotic nature lent to the album by its unfamiliar sonic palette and structure. More likely, I think, the album’s uniqueness situates it among a growing family of works which are alike because they are different, unified by their dissimilarity to everything else. Such is the power of fog; sometimes the honest appraisal a work deserves comes only when its surroundings are impossible to see.

Highlights: Vuoren laelle, Painovoimaa, valoa, Lue kartalta