On listening, long-form albums and libraries

I sometimes wonder when the act of listening to music changed for me. These days I, probably like most people, often listen while doing other things: driving, cooking, cleaning, or trying to drown out the noise of the world. Noise-cancelling headphones help. And although I love listening to music, I rarely sit down with the singular purpose of just listening.

I grew up in a small Finnish town, and the library was often my after-school refuge. In winter it was already turning dusky by mid-afternoon. I’d walk through the snow, drop the heavy schoolbag and jacket in some corner, and enter a world of comics, books, and music.

The music corner had a special appeal. You would choose a vinyl by the cover alone: being it dragons, cosmic swirls or strange landscapes. Portals basically. That’s how I, over the years, stumbled across Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and Ommadawn, Jethro Tull’s Minstrel in the Gallery, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and so many others.

Listening followed a certain ritual. You'd pick the album and bring the record to the counter. The librarian would take it, hand over a pair of big, heavy, and slightly cracked leather headphones with a curly cable, and exile you to your assigned “station”. This was a numbered socket with a lonely volume knob on the back of a sofa in a silent corner. The record player was behind the counter, out of sight and completely out of your control. No skipping tracks and no fast-forward. Obviously also no phone and pings. Plug in, sit down and wait for the first crackle of the vinyl. And then nothing but the music and your own restless mind.

Sometimes it was boring, sometimes hypnotic, sometimes so consuming it felt like time folded in on itself. And sometimes I’d simply drift off, drooling into my hand-knitted sweater with the giant headphones over my small head (yes, small head - enormous brain, allegedly).

It's strange to realise how almost radical that experience feels nowadays. To sit still with one piece of music and let it unfold exactly as intended. This is something I’ve been chasing ever since. Many of our albums are actually built for that kind of deep listening. Klingra (as well as Klingra’s …eftir), OPUS, parts of Lux, Reptilica Polaris, and now Movements I, which pushes it even further. It's the first part of a trilogy that eventually will become a two-hour sequence.

While working on Movements, this old library ritual kept returning to me. The album isn’t made for shuffle or playlists, even though we carved out a few singles for those ecosystems. It’s more like a long arc where one piece prepares the ground for the next. It only really becomes itself if you let it run from start to finish. And I am very aware that is asking a lot in a world where attention is constantly being splintered and fragmented into atoms. But maybe that's exactly why it feels worth doing these kinds of projects, and why it feels relevant to ask for this attention. Also from myself, to be honest.

Writing long-form music is not exactly modern career advice that I keep stumbling upon. But on some level, it is a small vote against the idea that everything must be instantly digestible. And a stubborn belief that there's still value in giving one thing your full attention, even just for 40 minutes.

If you ever decide to sit down with a piece of music, in a library corner or somewhere in other ways for you magical, I hope this can give you a feeling of leaving the ordinary time for a while. And returning slightly rearranged.

Movements I - out now!