“I wanted to re-create my relationship to nature. I felt that it was strong when I was young, but that I’d somehow lost it over the years,” says composer Meriheini Luoto, also known as fiddler and nyckelharpa player in the folk groups Akkajee and Hohka.

She grew up in Perniö, a small town between Helsinki and Turku where she says there was “a silence and tranquillity far from the city noise”.

Yet nature is not always tranquil and comforting.

According to ancient Finnish folklore, a person or animal lost in the wilderness can become trapped, paralysed or invisible. Luoto delved into these disturbing tales, which inspired her first solo albums, the Metsänpeitto releases in 2017 and 2019.

Like nature itself, her compositions and violin solos in this two-part suite range from gorgeous to frightening, often over menacing drones.

Her third album, Talven uneen vaipuen (“Falling Into Winter’s Sleep”), released in late 2025, is gentler and dreamier. It features 16 musicians in four quartets, with her own violin barely discernible.

Though its 10 sections are performed by groups drawing on genres from folk and jazz to contemporary chamber music, the suite feels seamlessly unified. It proceeds as organically and inexorably as the progression from autumn to spring that it parallels.

The plucked and bowed strings of “Ensilumen alta” (“Beneath the First Snow”) bring to mind the folky chamber music of Penguin Café Orchestra, while the strings on other pieces are reminiscent of Kronos Quartet recordings such as Terry Riley’s “Half-Wolf Dances Mad in Moonlight”. Fittingly, the title track of that album is Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen’s “Vintern var hård” (“Winter was Hard”), based on a bleak winter poem by Bo Carpelan.

Workshopping winter

The record grows naturally out of the Metsänpeitto project. This latest suite is subtler, though, without the spikes of harrowing violin and drum intensity that marked the earlier albums. The first, released nearly a decade ago and shortlisted for the Teosto Prize, was based on her master’s degree concert at the Sibelius Academy.

“At that point, I was quite into improvisation and sound art. I got the idea of a site-specific concert where I was the only one in front of the audience, but there were other musicians hidden in the balconies,” she explains. “I did many concerts based on that idea, including the Talven uneen vaipuen concert in 2024, with musicians around the space.”

Creating the new album differed from Metsänpeitto in that this time she worked with four ensembles one by one, starting with the saxophone quartet Saxtronauts.

In late 2025, Saxtronauts played the international premiere of three sections of the work at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK. Luoto’s works have also been performed at festivals such as the Tampere Biennale and Helsinki’s Musica nova.

Before the album was recorded, the sax quartet spent several weeks workshopping the pieces with Luoto.

“They improvised and I gave them advice and recorded everything. I left them a lot of freedom and was inspired by their playing, but made the final decisions myself,” says Luoto.

Thanks to a grant, Luoto was able to spend several weeks each working with Saxtronauts and the vocal group Signe – or at least three of its singers. The quartet’s fourth vocalist and bassist Kaisa Mäensivu was busy on the New York jazz scene at the time.

Signe plays a key role in the album’s centrepiece, the spooky eight-minute “Unessa, lumessa” (“In a Dream, in the Snow”) with whooshing wind sounds from the four-man Awake Percussion. That quartet adds a gamelan effect to the hypnotic, minimalist “Kun toiset yhä nukkuvat” (“While Others Still Sleep”).

“We mostly recorded everything live in one or two takes. I spent one day at the studio with each ensemble recording their basic tracks, then overdubbed some soundscapes,” Luoto says.

From stage to studio in days

In sharp contrast to the Metsänpeitto discs, Luoto’s own playing on the latest album is low-profile.

“It felt good to do it this way, because I could listen to the whole thing. If you’re playing, it’s difficult to understand how it feels to the audience,” she says.

That also helped her make the album into a unified work although the parts are performed by four different groups.

“I recorded everything, made a demo of the whole piece and imagined the rest during more than a year working on the compositions. All 16 of us met for the first time and played this piece two days before the concert. We went into the studio immediately after the concert, so that part was a quick process. The mixing took months, though.”

The album, recorded in rural Ingå, is similar to the concert version – with one exception.

“In the concert, we had a finale celebrating the spring, kind of a big fanfare, but I decided to leave that off the album. It didn’t feel right. It was really nice way to end the concert, but I wanted to leave this more meditative feeling. Just the winter and no spring.” The disc does however end with the promise of warmer weather: a brief track of bird-like whistling.

Another reason for the low profile of her own violin was health-related.

“I was still recovering from long Covid, which I got in 2020. At that point, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to play professionally again. It lasted for a few years I was maybe 30 percent myself. I could work for a day and then had to rest for awhile,” she recalls. “But I’ve recovered well and have been playing gigs for a while now.”

Cross-genre collaborations

Signe’s appearance on the album could be seen as returning a favour – with a nature recurring theme in their collaboration.

In 2021, Luoto was a featured soloist on the group’s album Phonemes. She played violin on an extended piece by jazz composer Mikko Sarvanne, “Do Trees Hear the Noise?” – an apparent reference to logging machinery.

Luoto’s collaborations with Signe are typical of her own disregard for musical categories, and of her recurring partnerships across a two-decade career.

Another example is percussionist and flautist Minna Koskenlahti, who plays on all of Luoto’s albums. She was a later member of the folk music group Hohka, which Luoto co-founded at age 16 while a student at the Sibelius Upper Secondary School in Helsinki.

By 2011, Luoto had moved on to the Sibelius Academy as Hohka recorded its first album. That year, the group won a Nordic folk music competition in Sweden, going on to play around Europe and the US. The group released its second album in 2015, but faded a couple of years later.

Another regular collaborator is her Akkajee duo partner Iida Savolainen, who adds viola, violin and vocals to Luoto’s albums. They formed their duo in 2010, guesting on an album by “folktronica” band Husky Rescue, and winning the Folk Group of the Year award in 2022.

“Early on, our music had a more playful side. We improvised a lot around old bowed-lyre melodies, while at the same time creating our own compositions. In recent years, though, we’ve really grown into our own sound — one that’s driven by experimentation and artistic freedom. The humour has mostly given way to darker shades.”

Sixteen years on, Akkajee releases its third album Pölynkerääjä (“Dust Collector”) in late February 2026 featuring the Oma Ensemble choir.

The album includes the song “Ikiliikkuva” (“Perpetually in Motion”), which appeared in a slightly different version in 2025 on the Nouse Luonto (“Rise, Nature”) nature conservation benefit album. It features folk artists such as Frigg, Maija Kauhanen, Kimmo Pohjonen and Anette Åkerlund.

Akkajee joined them, the Oma Ensemble and many others in February for a sold-out Nouse Luonto benefit concert at the Helsinki Music Centre. Proceeds went to preserve several hectares of old-growth forest via the Finnish Natural Heritage Foundation.

Kiddie fiddlers of Kaustinen

Among the other performers that night were about 80 child violinists, part of the Näppärit movement that began in Finland’s “folk music capital” of Kaustinen.

Young Meriheini attended a Näppärit summer camp in Kaustinen when she was around seven, setting her on her own artistic path.

“I’d been taking violin lessons since I was four, but I wasn’t super-enthusiastic about that. It was a bit boring, because nobody else played fiddle in my little town. Then I went there and played with 200 other kids. That was a huge thing for me. For the first time, I thought ‘this is cool’.”

She studied at the Salo Music Institute for a couple of years before her family moved to Karjaa, closer to Helsinki.

“There I started playing steel pans with the school band, with completely different kinds of rhythms and everything. I really loved that and played in steel bands for almost 10 years,” says Luoto.

Meanwhile, her teenage listening leaped between rock bands like HIM and Nightwish, classical composers such as Shostakovich, and folk music ensembles like Frigg, Snekka and Tsuumi Sound System, whom she saw during annual visits to the Kaustinen Folk Festival.

Deep listening and genre-bending

In 2014, Luoto recorded with the Sibelius Academy Folk Big Band and two years later graduated with a master’s degree in folk music. She then spent a few months in Toronto, where she met Pauline Oliveros, whose ‘Deep Listening’ philosophy had a profound impact on her.

The American composer, accordionist and electronic music pioneer – who collaborated with Terry Riley – died two years later. She was deeply inspired by the natural world, sometimes performing in caves.

Oliveros defined Deep Listening as “exploring the relationships among any and all sounds, whether natural or technological,” calling it a way “to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it”.

That brings us back to the question of genres. As a sign of how difficult Luoto’s work is to pigeonhole, Talven uneen vaipuen is nominated for Classical Album of the Year at the Emma Awards (the “Finnish Grammys”), to be handed out 7 March. Meanwhile, it was nominated as album of the year in the folky Etno category at the Finnish Indie Awards.

So are folk and classical still the backbone of her work?

“Somehow,” replies Luoto, then pauses and adds: “But I’m quite far from both. Maybe this could be called minimalist, contemporary experimental or avant-garde adventurous music? I’m not really inside any particular genre, but deep listening may be close.”

That’s in mind as she composes a piece for cellist Iida-Vilhelmiina Sinivalo’s doctoral concert at the Sibelius Academy in March.

“It’s about dreams,” she says. “Really deep listening stuff.”