Guitarist Lauri Manner, aka Kadonnut Manner, has recently released his album "The First Train to Kajanaland - Finnish Primitive Guitar vol. 2". Kajanaland (or nowadays more usually Kainuu) is the region in Northern Finland where he is from, and on the cover is a photo of the first train arriving there in 1905.
Kadonnut Manner means "The Lost Continent", a kind of a pun on his last name that also sounds appropriate for making music while living on the European continent at times like these.
"Finnish Primitive Guitar" means it's guitar music very much influenced by John Fahey and other American Primitive Guitar players, and it's composed and played by a Finn. It's rhythmic and hypnotic music, scary and dissonant at some times, silly and playful at other and not overtly repetitive or pretentious at any point. The most usual feedback he gets from my live shows and music overall is that the listeners start floating off to elsewhere, conversations end in mid-sentence people and start recalling memories they didn't remember having.
He was born in 1983 in Suomussalmi, took trumpet lessons and played in a brass band when he was 10, took up bass guitar when he was 15, dropped out of all formal music studies, formed a punk band and never looked back. Besides playing both kinds of music (punk and hardcore) he was always into "classic" rock, blues and the roots of the whole thing, so starting from some CCR tapes his uncle gave him when he was 10 years old, he got into Allman Brothers, country blues of Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Blind Blake and all those early acoustic blues players.
Finally discovering John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Jack Rose playing this really unique music that has the drive and rhythm of the blues but with musical ideas that are all over the place was the thing that forced him to start learning fingerpicking guitar in 2015.
stream the album at the service of your choice:
Bandcamp: https://kadonnutmanner.bandcamp.com/album/the-first-train-to-kajanaland
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6IrDIIu1SefefbN5MBG801?si=o_eDTHiMSAu8FpZda2F2uQ
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/album/68095612
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/first-train-to-kajanaland-finnish-primitive-guitar/1410391074
