Published
Name: Laura Naukkarinen aka Lau Nau
Nationality: Finnish
Occupation: Composer, producer, improviser
Current release: Laura Naukkarinen teams up with Jonah Parzen-Johnson for Live In Italy, out via WeJazz.
If you enjoyed this Lau Nau interview and would like to know more about her music and projects, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, bandcamp, and Facebook.
There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?
Some of my favourite sounds are: paper in contact with hands, a pearl in a wine glass, a soft RRRRRRRR, a cat’s purr, the breathing of a small child asleep, a fog horn.
And the wind, I can gladly listen it for hours and hours. The ever changing white noise, the whole spectrum of frequencies. Light rain. When I get to sit on my front porch with a coffee and listen to this I feel lucky to be alive.
The sound of the gasoline engines of cars and big motorcycles drive me crazy. I am quite good in filtering out unwanted noise, but there is something with the engines that just triggers me.
Listening is something we learn while growing up and living, it’s bound to our culture and surroundings. The curator and art writer Bavisha Panchia wrote about how a sound of a distant manifestation can be a sound of solidarity for some, whereas it can sound threatening to some others.
It’s interesting to think how different connotations different sounds have for us.
Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?
In Helsinki there is this old Fazer café in the city centre, where you can sit under a dome. The sounds travel via the dome, you can hear a conversation from the other side of the room like they would sit right next to you. It feels like magic trickery.
I also love transitions where you can hear the changes in your audible environment, like getting closer to a river over a hill and suddenly you hear it so clear, or when you come out from the metro and suddenly you hear all the sounds of the station hall.
Or when you enter a wood heated outdoors sauna, coming from the nature sounds to a wooden room with fire crackling, it’s such a beautiful transition.
What are among your favourite spaces to record and play your music?
My favourite place to record music is our house on the island of Kimitoön in Finland. It’s a wooden house with a lot of books, carpets, wooden floor and ceiling. Everything sounds warm and comfy.
A big part of my catalogue has been recorded there, at least partly: the duo album A Few We Remember with Jonah Parzen-Johnson, my Lau Nau albums Poseidon, Aphrilis, Hem. Någonstans, the collab albums with Sontag Shogun, and many film scores.
My field recording album Örö underwater diary has been recorded in the neighbour island and my live album Puutarhassa in the garden next doors.
The village where the house is is a rather isolated place, near the sea, far from the centre of the island, so I get a good sense of disconnecting which helps in immersing myself in the creative things. I get easily in a creative flow, and it helps me if I can now and then go outside, walk or do maintenance work and then get back to creative work.
I also do most of my field recordings on that island, and it feels like a privilege to have a deep connection with that environment and place.
Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?
Sometimes when I listen I like to visualise how the material moves around me triggered by sounds. Like when a bus drives past the house I might visualise how the bass frequencies make the material of the building to vibrate. Or how the particles in the air have been moving just before a distant sound is reaching my ears.
I really love how you can capture sound on material, like carve it on a vinyl or organise magnetic particles on a tape so that they represent sound. And what about optical sound. All this physicality still feels somewhat magical.
When I work with sound, I think more of it as building a fire than sculpting. I light fires and put them out, diminish the flames at some position and blow more oxygen to another. I don’t always know what happens when I do something, it’s not completely under my control.
Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?
When I started recording underwater sounds some years ago with my Jfr hydrophones in the water, I went to the lakeside where I spent my childhood summers, and heard this high tuned chirping of corixas communicating with each other. I remembered the sound immediately, it was something I had heard as a child while diving, but I had just thought that it was my ears ringing. It was totally new information to me that it was the sound of the insects living in the water.
Starting from there I have recorded a lot of underwater sounds and I am just now working on a bigger project about underwater soundscapes in forests. It makes me emotional to think of how we are not aware of a vast majority of sounds happening around us on this planet. It’s exciting how many different ways there is to hear and listen. While human ears and conventional microphones detect sound as pressure fluctuations, some other animals sense sound by monitoring particle velocity, using sensory hairs, or relying on tactile body sensations.
Spiders lack ears. Instead, sensory hairs on their legs react sensitively to changes in air movement, and they detect vibrations through sensory receptors located near their leg joints and their webs act as vibration-sensing extensions. Fish perceive sound through their inner ears, and the lateral line sense additionally detects the movement of water particles nearby. For earthworms, the whole body works as a vibration detector since the sensory cells in the skin detect ground vibrations. Crickets listen using tympanal organs located on their front legs. Beyond stridulation, bush-crickets may communicate by shaking their bodies against plant stems, allowing the signal to travel along the stem.
I’m left with awe when I think of all this. And think how different our environment would sound to us humans if we could listen in the same ways as other species listen.
Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?
Sadly I have tinnitus in my right ear. I think that talking to the phone and sometimes working with headphones for too long have caused me this problem, even though I have tried to be very careful with the volume.
I’m curious if it is possible to train my brain to not hearing the tinnitus so much. I’m trying my best to forget it and not to get too anxious about it.
We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?
Our natural environment is never silent, it’s just a matter of volume levels, different ways of hearing, focus and intentionality. I feel good focusing on the small sounds, that’s why I want to live outside a city.
I have a little bit of hypersensitivity for different stimulus, and very little mental space for listening to audiobooks, podcasts or music in my free time. Being in a quieter environment feels good for me. I do also enjoy a loud concert or dancing when the music is loud.
I wonder if silence has become a privilege and luxury, allowed only for people who have the means to choose where they live and work? I feel that I am rather privileged in that way. In many ways. Silence is political. Choosing to be silent or speaking out - both are political acts.
Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?
That’s a nice question and I’m curious about it. Vinciane Despret has introduced the concept of phonocene, which moves focus from the visual to understand the planet through sound. We who have good eyesight are so used to the visual information being dominant.
I lead a monthly collective listening club called Kuuntelukerho since 2024, where we experiment with and practice different ways of listening, hearing and sounding. It has been really interesting to practice and talk about listening in a group, hearing how differently one can experience sound.
I’m sure we would find so much more information about us and our environment if we would practice our listening skills more - and I don’t talk only about individual listening skills, but also how to listen to and with each other.
