KANSANMUSIIKKILEHTI (Finnish Folk Music Magazine) 02/2024 30.5.2024 by Virpi Sahi 

Px3Kauppila: The Hanged Maid

"After listening to the record three times, I had to say that this now goes into the category "I won't give up on these records". It is a wonderful whole, the layers and tones produced by rhythm, story and soundscapes ripple on the surface and in the depths. Cold and warm. So you don't have an artificial reckoning wrapped around your neck. I can't figure out how to replace this disc with.

Don't let the album cover and title scare you. The atmosphere is gentle and comforting, only becoming a little unnerving at times. Many songs go so strongly with the rhythm and image that they are easy to fill in with your own thoughts. If this album were a landscape, it would be blue-gray, maze-like and ruined. The texts naturally float on the branches of the music like dew pearls. They study the interfaces between mind and culture, deviations and mental disorders, or disorders of our culture in relation to healthy individuals, depending on the point of view. This is worth listening to when you need to read yourself between the lines.

The Hanged Maid is Pauliina Kauppila's solo album and for the listener a simultaneous celebration of percussion instruments and vocals. Each song is dedicated to a certain percussion. On the opening track, the self-confident drum kit hit on the edge is energizing. Every percussion, from the triangle to the pandeiro, has its place. They sink into the same moss carpet as the text and atmosphere. Darkly looming South American cajons, congas, and a few more strange instruments, such as the three-tone string and rhythm instrument berimbau or the udu clay drum. Well thought-out instruments play airy and pleasing when they come across, for example piano and saxophone. Honors Bowie and Pärt, who are mentioned as role models.

Kauppila sings versatile and polyphonic, layering tracks. It's refreshing to hear a voice that's skilled but not worn out in folk music. In ancient words, the song is formed naturally from the mouth of a modern person, but if necessary, in the Bulgarian way of cooing, whispering or chanting. In some places, a soft radio voice narrates the events, bringing comedy to a difficult situation.

The album's cutting-edge culminates in the title track, a three-part work about the death of a maiden. I remember asking the hanged girl if it was really a compulsion, or just a cultural compulsion. We always have these in our cargo. On this album, crazy, bullied and gloomy women get their own voice. The voice can be the voice of any of us at some point in time. This album is therapy!"

Virpi Sahi 30.5.2024

Review in desibeli.net: http://desibeli.net/arvostelu/9274 5.6.2024 by Mika Roth

       

”There are many kinds of music. With its means, it is able to bend the times into aknot, to tie the creaking cords of its cultural freshness and to fill the old with the new, and the new
with the old. In other words, you never know what's going to happen when you let the sounds fill the space. Even so, I'm already at this point raising The Hanged Maid -album
as one of the surprises of the year, even though we're barely into summer. Px3Kauppila is an artist who brings Finnish spell poems to life with his music, but does
not tie his hands to the so-called with rules and restrictions. Musically, we often move in David Lynch's neo-magical night and in the multi-level darkness of latter-day David Bowie,
somewhere in the borderland between experimental pop rock, folk music and theatricality. The track ”Burn the Circle!” is even directly inspired by Bowie's "Heart's Filthy Lesson"
track. This time, Elektro has released an exorcism story with a mouth harp, which burns away the weeds of inferiority.

The Hanged Maid is an album entity that turns into many things, a journey through time, place and especially emotional states. The old spells and the new gods of the modern
world step into the ring with each other, the whole album being "a declaration, a rebellion and a praise for acoustic percussion". Times change, stories don't so much, so the themes include e.g. the familiar problems of equality and mental health, greed, lust, fear and sometimes incomprehension. All of these serve as mirror surfaces for new, 'civilized' times, because in the end man is still too often like a beast to a beast.

A lot has been played with a rhythm instrument and most of the tracks are dedicated to some instruments, being very folk in a way. Refusing an Old Man - track stretches and
twists when the girl who refused the proposal gets to know the old man's revenge. And it's not about the God Ukko from ancient times, but just an ordinary idiot who, in his thickheadedness, doesn't understand that no is no. The Endless Night´s haunting notes have a touch of jazz, but demonic-like whispers and complaints keep the tones black and red. The world lives in the night time again, darkness spreads like cancer from conflict hotspots and nations tear each other to shreds. This also
bleeds into the songs in different ways, with only imagination acting as a limit. Transforming all of that into an original, rhythmic, alive and growing work is an
achievement, but Px3Kauppila turns out to be quite a factor. After all, Please Grant Me Sleep - track longs for the comfort of rest in the hours of the night and the borderlands of twilight, where one does not want to wander for too long.

The album ends with The Hanged Maid trilogy, which at more than ten minutes long becomes the album's main work. The first part, The Thicket, is an ominously humming
journey through a foggy nightmare landscape. Tragedy hangs in the air and when the poem that Lönnrot once collected takes over Paula Präktig's piano track, the stomachchurning atmosphere is suddenly full. Maybe too full, but the work - and the whole album at the same time - is allowed to end on a slightly brighter eve.
Lynch has been mentioned and I understand the comparison, but there is much more to the works created by Px3Kauppila. From the side of the film, I notice Fellini's characteristic partly inexplicable sadness, where history sometimes lifts, sometimes squeezes under its leaden cargo. Godard, the master himself, also comes to mind, as Px3Kauppila uses pieces removed from his frames of reference as she likes. To play with meanings, signs, words, with the image breaking on purpose time after time, and everything still remaining intact.

The album is strange and difficult, but also deep and sensitive. It puts the listener on a bench where sitting comfortably can be surprisingly difficult at times. But why should
everything be nice when the world is what it is. Fortunately, we have music, words, and the ability to create things bigger than ourselves.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

 Mika Roth 5.6.2024 desibeli.net

Px3Kauppila

 

The Hanged Maid (EKZ)

 

"Px3Kauppila is the stage name of percussionist Pauliina Kauppila. In its shelter, the musician enlivens Finnish spell poems that were used to cure diseases, drive away witches and invoke the gods even a hundred years ago. The Hanged Maid overlaps folk music, talde tunes and experimental movement in a seductively open-minded way. The rhythms get to the essential part, which shapes the album into a pulsating masterpiece. The union of acoustic percussion and vocal harmonies glows with sumptuous diversity. The album's main work is the more than ten-minute title trilogy, which emanates an ancient fatalism. Pauliina Kauppila's sensual dive into the depths of the human mind oozes mysticism."

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

- Juha Seitz/ Ilkka-Pohjalainen 15.7.2024