Following his brilliant but unrelentingly sorrowful previous album, Arvola returns with Silmät sulaa — a record he describes as “my summer album.” And of course, its warmth feels more like a heatstroke from a sun too close.
Inside the sun-kissed soundscapes drift memories of sunburnt skin, the burning of a childhood home, heat exhaustion during an At The Gates show, the smell of melting asphalt, and a bat circling above a hospital bed, struck mid-air by a nurse and crushed underfoot.
Composed and produced over the course of two winter months in early 2024, Silmät sulaa began as an attempt to make something brighter, more hopeful. But instead of light, Arvola found complexity. The songs were written in chronological order, with side A threading luscious string motifs, and side B spiralling into more otherworldly, unstable terrain.
Among the album’s more experimental tools are the daxophone and a dual looper called Cocoquantus, used to process textures in tandem with his modular synthesizer. In post-production, certain sections were dubbed to tape and reworked into loops on a reel-to-reel recorder, allowing them to unravel and decay.
The album’s cover shows Arvola and members of his family entering a cave dwelling late at night somewhere in Cyprus in the early 1990s. The title — Silmät sulaa, or “Eyes melt” — was inspired by a pair of Trolli candy eyeballs bought during a sweltering visit to Genoa’s Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno. Their harrowingly realistic yellow gleam looked as if they’d caught some internal disease.
In memory, the cave and the candy merge into the same, slowly melting fever dream.
