It starts with waves. A simple, ever-so-slightly warbly keyboard figure repeats and seems to recede into the distance as nearly imperceptible vocals seep in underneath.

That’s the opening track of Momentary Movements of Landscapes, the meditative third solo album by Juha Mäki-Patola, who crafts richly visual electroacoustic music in his studio in the oldest part of Helsinki.

The album, consisting of 12 miniature “movements,” was released last spring by the influential British label 130701. It’s part of FatCat Records, which set it up in July 2001 (hence the name) to release “post-classical” and “more orchestrated and instrumental material”.

Over the past quarter-century, 130701 artists such as Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Dustin O’Halloran helped forge a new crossover field drawing on classical, electronic and other genres, all going on to successful careers in film scores.

“FatCat 130701 is such an influential label, with this huge legacy. I’m so happy and privileged to be part of this. I’ve always listened to their releases, which you might call modern classical or ambient, close to what I create myself,” says Mäki-Patola.

“I’m a huge fan of 130701 artists like Ian William Craig from Vancouver, who makes absolutely fantastic albums using voice and looping,” he says. “Then there’s Hauschka, who does super-interesting piano explorations, as well as Ava Rasti from Iran and the New York cellist Clarice Jensen.”

The parent label, FatCat, released early records by Icelandic post-rock bands Sigur Rós and múm, which includes Finnish drummer Samuli Kosminen. Last spring he and Mäki-Patola made separate musical contributions to the Purkutaide art installation in Helsinki.

Teenage tape dreams

All these artists freely cross genre barriers, as Mäki-Patola has since starting out on saxophone at a Tampere music academy. Soon he added guitar, starting a teenage band with friends to play punk and Nirvana covers – “quite a standard way to get into the musical world,” as he puts it. At 14, he bought a four-track tape recorder.

“That was a big thing for me, to start recording. I spent a lot of time in my room recording guitar things,” he recalls. Mäki-Patola still keeps that recorder in his studio, near his home in Helsinki’s oldest neighbourhood, Vanhakaupunki.

Mäki-Patola studied music technology and pedagogy in Tampere before working as an engineer at a recording studio in Tampere and at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, while actively playing a variety of instruments in folk, rock and jazz groups.

“In my early twenties, I dreamed of being a jazz guitarist. I practiced maniacally and played with a lot of Tampere jazz musicians like members of the trio Black Motor. I recorded their first album about 20 years ago,” he says.

Before that, he launched his own record label, Lumpeela Julkaisut, in 2010.

“For about five years, I did everything from scratch, from recording to releasing, PR and everything. Those were big learning processes that have been very helpful in working with other labels later. I know how this ecosystem works, how to negotiate contracts and everything. I also worked with some German record labels, helping them book gigs here. So it’s been a long trip involving many ways of making music,” he says.

Lumpeela’s releases included debut albums by singer-songwriter Laura Moisio and jazz bassist Ville Rauhala, as well as his bands Black Motor and Rakka, plus Mäki-Patola’s own bandswhich featured Rauhala and vocals by his wife Liina Mäki-Patola, who also did the label’s cover art. Mäki-Patola also worked on an album by Mark Olson of the American folk-rock band the Jayhawks before releasing his own solo debut, Breath, in 2020.

With the world then taking a breath – or struggling to breathe – the time was ripe for a downshift to more introspective instrumental music.

That was released by Hush Hush Records, run by Alex Ruder, a music director at the pioneering Seattle public radio station KEXP, where he specialises in “ambient/neo-classical/bliss-out” music, as he puts it.

Two years later, the same label released Open, Mäki-Patola’s subtle duo album with saxophonist Tapani Rinne of electrojazz group RinneRadio. In 2023, Mäki-Patola contributed to the latest RinneRadio album as well as Rinne’s solo project Grey.

That same year, he collaborated with Norwegian pianist Julia Gjertsen on the album Dive for the UK label Bigo & Twigetti, as well as his first EP for Moderna Records in Montreal.

“FatCat came very soon after that. I had two albums ready at the same time. And one went to Moderna and then FatCat got interested very quickly when I sent them demos in autumn 2024. Within a couple of weeks, they said, ‘this sounds very good’ and arranged a Teams meeting right away. But I was just about to release my Moderna album, Solar Nights, so we had to wait a while,” he explains.

“Early last year, I wrote more tracks and they got really interested. So then it happened. Maybe in March, they said, ‘okay, we’re now very close to an album’. So we started doing all this scheduling and PR. They sent a photographer here and we went to Hanko to shoot pictures and videos for a couple of days.”

The first single, “Moment 2”, appeared in January and has been featured in a BBC TV spot ever since, with the album following in April.

Besides Ruder, the composer has gained support from another influential American public-radio host, John Schaefer of New York’s WNYC. Earlier this year, he dedicated an hour-long episode of his long-running New Sounds programme (est. 1982) to ambient landscapes last spring, featuring and inspired by Mäki-Patola’s latest release, which he described as “spacious, immersive and stunning”.

Hidden textures and sub-melodies

Mäki-Patola also got support with the new album in the form of guest appearances from past collaborators Rinne and Gjertsen, among others. Canadian multi-instrumentalist Jessica Hébert (aka Ambre Ciel) adds violin improv on the wide-screen cinematic “Moment 4”, and there are some heavily treated vocals by his daughter Frida Mäki-Patola on the closing track.

“There’s a lot happening on this album, atmospheres, melodies and sub-melodies going around. I think it’s interesting when there are hidden textures or melodies, so that you’re not sure what’s happening. It’s an endless territory of finding something new and interesting,” he says.

In a departure from his earlier releases, this album centres around looping. “I recorded improvisations on upright piano, electric guitar, Prophet 10 or Moog synth and then looped them through various kinds of analogue gear, tape echo and reverb,” he explains.

“For me, the computer is just a recording engine. I don’t use software instruments or any kind of computer-based programming. This album also features some recorded sounds from my surroundings. The result is maybe 50-50 acoustic/electronic, but it’s hard to say.”

As those opening waves – and Schaefer’s ambient landscapes show suggest – this is programme music, designed to evoke a particularplace or element of nature.

“When I start improvising, there’s some kind of emotion behind it, some kind of inspiration from something that’s happened or how I feel walking around in the winter or at night, just listening to sounds of nature, for instance. It’s a way of communicating with other people, nature and everything around you,” says Mäki-Patola.

“Places and times of the year bring different feelings and emotions. That’s part of what I’m trying to recreate. It’s hard to explain in words, but it’s feeling the surroundings and everything around you, and somehow transforming it.”

I ask Mäki-Patola to respond to some common assumptions about ambient music, such as that it’s “just simple relaxing background music that all sounds the same”.

First off, he denies that ambient is simple. “It’s minimal, which is difficult to make. It’s not simple to create a minimal album or concert that someone can listen to for an hour or a half.”

“And it certainly doesn’t all sound the same to me. Maybe all food tastes the same to some people. But it’s very easy to release music now. Anyone can upload music to Spotify. So of course it’s full of similar-sounding artists in every genre,” he points out.

“I don’t use AI. For me, it doesn’t work at all for art. Humans make art. AI makes some kind of calculations. They’re totally different things.”

He suggests that “Spotify has playlists full of that kind of stuff. They have an industrial process with their own writers creating it. But for me, that’s not art. It’s more like making some kind of blocks or factory widgets.”

“I do have quite a good number of listeners on other streaming services, though, like Apple Music. It definitely helps to have tracks included on popular playlists, whether they’re ‘ambient chill,’ ‘new classical,’ ‘electronic classical’ or whatever. The income from that is getting better all the time, but Spotify is a minor part of it.”

Another source of income is sync placements for TV series, films, ads and so on. Last year, he recorded an album called Ambient Piano Reflections for Stereo Royal, a Copenhagen-based sync label offering music for broadcast, films and things all over Europe and North America.

“But my main motivator for making music is dialogue with record labels, fellow artists and listeners,” he says.

This autumn, he has been busy creating a sound design for Liina Mäki-Patola’s and Leena Mäki-Patola’s art exhibition at the Varkaus art museum while finalising the score for a Tampere dance projectby Kurdish-born dancer, actor and director Kardo Shiwan.

“I’ve previously written music for his short films and other projects. It’s inspiring to work with dancers and directors. You can get rhythmical, melodic or harmonic ideas by seeing people dance.”

Mäki-Patola is also prepping for a rare live appearance in Prague, which he says “will be more minimal than the album. I’ll play piano and two synthesisers, looping and playing some tracks from Momentary Movements of Landscape, Solar Nights and Open, which I’m arranging to play solo.”

Now working with the Sonic Arts booking agency in Berlin, he looks forward to more performances around Europe and the UK next spring – along with work on his next release for FatCat.

Juha Mäki-Patola performs at the Spectaculare Festival in Prague on 8 November.

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