Over five productive years, Pori, Finland’s Juho Toivonen has recorded an extensive body of work that extends from, seemingly, a few simple, elegant principles, to do with repetition, melody, and emotional candour. With his new album for Sweden’s Discreet Music imprint, Kaksin, Toivonen’s achieved a further distillation; one of intimacy through mantric devotion. Across these two lengthy pieces, one foreshadowed by a brief, live introduction, Toivonen locates a phrase that functions as a kernel, a seed, from which grows music of reflective intensity.

We might be more used to the young Toivonen in his outward-facing enthusiasms: alongside gorgeous albums like Lapsikuninkaan Fanfaari (Discreet Music, 2025), Sisarusten Toistuva Uni (Discreet Music, 2024) and Kasveille Ja Eläimille (Futura Resistenza/Ultraääni, 2023), he also writes about, and releases, other people’s music, via Akti and Monk’s Hood, the latter in collaboration with Sterling Mackinnon of Cuneiform Tabs. But Kaksin, even with the contributions of Raimo Sinnemäki on trumpet, feels singular, and alone. Not lonely; alone.

Itämeri takes up the majority of the first side, after a brief live introduction where its melodic tattoo grounds vocal extemporisations. This slips by in just under two minutes, prefacing Itämeri’s quiet, lucid beauty. Toivonen takes hold of the melody, lets it repeat and percolate for minutes, and then pulls strands of it this and that way, having it slow-zoom, halt and reset, as though he’s pulling 8mm film across the projector’s shuttle. Sinnemäki colours around Toivonen, sending plumes of breath-tone across the piano’s hammered strings.

The title track takes up the album’s second side. Here, Toivonen carves chordal shapes that clang and burr against each other, drifting off into the hypnotic territory created by sympathetic resonance. The relationship between Sinnemäki and Toivonen, both here and on Itämeri, makes me think of the possibilities of a duo album by Tori Kudo and Hiroo Nakazaki of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, with trumpet replacing Nakazaki’s euphonium. There are also shades, in Toivonen’s playing (particularly its insistence) that recall Richard Youngs’s Advent and Making Paper, perhaps even the piano interludes on The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds.

But Toivonen’s meditative, moving song requires no comparison, and with Kaksin, he’s carved back to essence, finding the true note that suspends the heart between the strings. - Jon Dale

Edition of 500 copies, with insert.