In 2009, the news network Al Jazeera posted a video to its YouTube channel called Finland Forest Folk. The five-and-a-half-minute documentary showed Finnish musicians Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen) and Kuupuu (Jonna Karanka) composing and recording their fragile electronica in the middle of the boreal forest. Both artists at the time were associated with the Tampere-based Fonal label, and were key members of a group of musical explorers labeled the New Weird Finland or “forest folk” by music journalists. Naukkarinen has stated elsewhere that she began her career heavily influenced by such freak folk luminaries as Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan. She has also worked extensively with jouhikko revivalist Pekko Käppi. Despite this, watching the video at the time I heard very little of what I would call folk music in the electronic bleeps, bells, and haunting elfin vocals Naukkarinen and Karanka created. It was neither traditional nor “of the people.” That is not to say I dismissed the idea that the music might possibly be some sort of modern folk form, but that it just didn’t jibe with my pre-existing definition of the term. All these years later I’m still wrestling with this idea of how we define “folk” in an age of instant communication and software-driven everything. But I was very taken with the image of a deep sense of the land as muse for experimental music. This little video suggested that there existed a thriving, deeply rural avant-garde somewhere in the world, an idea that resonated very strongly with me.

A couple of years ago, Stefan Keydel was vacationing with his family in Finland. They had rented a cabin near Sulkava, an idyllic rural retreat with the requisite sauna down by the lakeside. Anyone who has ever spent the day driving across a landscape consisting of miles of unbroken forest, whether in West Virginia or Scandinavia, will know that at times it feels like traversing a dark green expanse of water. Hills become ocean swells, and the whole thing threatens to pull you under. The forest seemed to have this effect upon Stefan, and while at the cabin he dreamed that he was drowning on dry land. Freud associated dreams of water with birth, but popular psychology these days usually interprets dreams of drowning as arising from a fear of loss of control. And there are few places were the city-bred are less in control than the deep woods. This truth was already very old when the Brothers Grimm began gathering stories about children vanishing into the forest, as lost and irretrievable as if they were thrown into the sea.

One night during his stay, Stefan walked down to the lakeside where he saw a huge red moon hovering just above the tree line: a total lunar eclipse, a blood moon. He was familiar with the symbolism of a blood red moon from Revelation 6:12, “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.” Stefan tells me that this image, coupled with the earlier dream, felt apocalyptic. I assume he means this in the way the word is commonly used, to refer to a catastrophic end to things, one perhaps foretold in prophecy. But we should remember that this usage is something of a catachresis. “Apocalypse” in its original Greek means “revelation.” These twin revelatory events—the dream followed by the vision (however real the moon was, it still carried visionary meaning for him)—were the inspiration for the latest single by Keydel’s alter-ego, Dreihasenbild, on his own Wet Barbed Wire label.

The title track, “Verikuu sulkavan yli” [“Blood Moon Over Sulkava”], begins with what sounds like a music box playing a crisp, looping melody. Keydel’s violin soon enters the mix, adding a smoky, wooden warmth to the fragile, icy metal edge of the intro. A lone voice then emerges, stark and haunted. It is joined by others, broken angels, singing of drowning on dry land. Their chorus falls from the skies into the conifers below, somewhere between lament and mournful celebration. The track transcends the usual labels given to popular music and veers towards a certain modern classicism, but at heart it is pure Romanticism.

Basically a dramatic ambient piece, the opening notes of “After the Madness” sound at first almost like the string section of an orchestra tuning up, before settling into the electronic drift we expect from such a composition. Buried just below the surface, though, is a field recording. Impossible to identify, the sounds are both organic and mechanical, creating an unnerving subtext. A thoughtfully chosen B-side should serve as support act to the main event. It should complement and anchor the A-side without overshadowing it, and this track does that well.

Stefan photographed the blood moon as it rose over Sulkava, and that image appears on the single’s picture sleeve, designed by Will Branch. Keydel trained as a folklorist and is an accomplished violinist, but has also spent much of his life listening to and working with electronic sounds. He refers to his current work as hauntronica, which simultaneously evokes the ghosts of classic electronica and hauntology-as-genre. But if the output of the New Weird Finland artists can be called “forest folk,” then it’s also an appropriate enough label for this recording. I might also go so far as to add the label “visionary,” if not “apocalyptic.” So much music that is presented as “apocalyptic” these days is harsh, ragged, even brutal. The beauty of this disc proves that it need not be so. This is easy listening for those who actually listen.

“Verikuu sulkavan yli” releases today and can be ordered on the Dreihasenbild Bandcamp page.

—Stephen Canner