Lost villages, found sounds: Anne-Mari Kivimäki’s accordion trance

Whether she’s unearthing archival recordings from lost Karelia, improvising in Tallinn studios, or blending folk and electronica in danceable “accordion trance”, accordionist Anne-Mari Kivimäki’s work bridges borders – both geographical and musical. Now, as she prepares to release two new albums in 2025, Kivimäki continues to draw the threads of her unique career together, weaving tradition into new, unexpected forms. 

One is the fourth release from Suistamon Sähkö (“Suistamo Electricity”), an “ethno-techno” quartet she co-founded a decade ago with fellow musicologist Eero Grundström. He raps and lays down electronic beats alongside her accordion and vocals by Reetta-Kaisa Iles and Tuomas Juntunen, and live electronics by Antti Puumalainen. The band’s first album – part of Kivimäki’s doctoral work in folk music at the Sibelius Academy, completed in 2018 – featured snippets of archival audio from parts of Finnish Karelia lost to the USSR after the Winter and Continuation Wars of 1939–44.

That painful heritage also informs her new solo album, Kotiin (“Homeward”), due in February, and an accompanying multimedia exhibition at the Lahti Historical Museum, running until August 2025. The album’s first single, “Maalo”, was released on 13 December.

Wartime memories similarly inspired her Closed-Down Village project, originally part of her doctoral work. Running through all her endeavours is a deep passion for regional history and accordions of all kinds.

“Kaivos” (The Mine, 2018) was part of Anne-Mari Kivimäki’s internationally acclaimed Closed-Down Village project.

Kivimäki is known for her energetic, propulsive playing – and her enthusiasm for collaborations across genres and national borders, even when such connections are politically fraught.  Kotiin includes a collaboration with Daga Gregorowicz and Dana Vynnytska, vocalists from the Ukrainian-Polish band DagaDana. 

Kivimäki composed the song based on their experiences and a poem called ‘Longing for Karelia’. It was written in 1945 by her great-uncle from Jaakkima, a part of Finnish Karelia ceded to the Soviet Union a year earlier.

“I also asked Daga and Dana to express their feelings about this past year. It was great to find a soulful song from Ukraine and Poland that fit my composition,” she says. Recently, Kivimäki also interviewed the two singers about Russia’s attack on Ukraine for the Finnish radio programme ‘Yli rajan liitää laulu’ (roughly “Song glides over borders”), which she co-hosted. The show also featured folk musicians from various Finno-Ugric ethnic groups in Russia.

Jamming in Tallinn and Reykjavík 

Another collaboration on the album is with Ramo Teder and Marko Veisson of the Estonian folk duo Puuluup, who represented Estonia at Eurovision last year. 

“We improvised at their studio in Tallinn and recorded a nine-minute song for my album. It was great to play with Ramo and Marko and realise that we have the same aesthetics and a common way of making new music that suits everyone,” she says.

Kivimäki has also teamed up with another Finnish accordionist, Matti Kallio, who has lived in Reykjavík since 2009. 

“We’ve made music together for a series of short films based on the Kalevala [the Finnish national epic]. Matti throws himself into my projects. He asked the Icelandic rapper Birnir, who lives downstairs from him, to write lyrics for one of the Kalevala films. It was great to watch how my music inspired first Matti and then Birnir,” she says. 

Yet another unusual team-up in recent years was with Seela Sella, one of Finland’s most celebrated actors, whose career began in the 1950s and who played Jean Sibelius’s wife Aino in a 2003 biopic. They performed together in a play directed by Kari Paukkunen, who has worked with Sella for half a century.

“I had the great pleasure of composing the music, playing the accordion and a role onstage,” says Kivimäki. “It was great to watch the work of a wonderful actor and improvise with her. I’ve always had a great time with Seela, hearing her wonderful stories and life wisdom.” 

Kivimäki with Seela Sella, one of Finland’s most celebrated actors. Photo: Sanna Breilin

In 2019, Kivimäki recorded the album Hämeen lauluja (“Häme Songs”) with jouhikko (bowed lyre) player Pekko Käppi and jazz bassist Ville Rauhala. The album features songs from the Häme region – not far from her native Tampere – as well as “Ain’t No Grave”, an American gospel song popularised by Johnny Cash. 

Kivimäki’s versatility extends to Puhti, a duo with Iles. Together, they established Kihtinäjärvi Records – now renamed Folk Extreme – where Kivimäki serves as executive artistic director. Apart from having released albums, short films and music videos, the company exports experimental Finnish folk music and was behind the ‘Yli rajan liitää laulu’ radio programme.

Tampere and further afield

While much of Kivimäki’s inspiration comes Eastern Finland’s border regions, she has lived most of her 48 years in and around Tampere, besides studies at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. 

Another area that’s close to her heart is South Ostrobothnia, not far from Tampere, where she worked for several years on a folk music development project. That’s also where she experienced a formative moment: 

“I decided I wanted to play the accordion when I was nine, after my parents took me to an accordion festival. They bought me a 5-row chromatic accordion and I started taking lessons. When I was 13, I went to a folk music camp in Isojoki, South Ostrobothnia, where my 97-year-old grandmother still lives. I improvised with others and for the first time realised that the accordion could be used for more than just old accordion music – and that I could create music myself. Folk music and improvisation swept me away.” 

Teachers at the 1989 camp were young students from the Sibelius Academy folk music department including Marianne Maans, Leena Joutsenlahti and Kimmo Pohjonen. The latter is credited with revitalising and reinventing Finnish accordion music around the turn of the millennium along with Maria Kalaniemi, with whom Kivimäki started taking lessons at the age of 16. 

In 1993, Kivimäki founded her first folk music band, Spontaani Vire along with Grundström. The band won an array of awards and toured Europe and North America, with Johanna Juhola later taking over as accordionist.

Kivimäki is known for her energetic, propulsive playing. Photo: Katri Kallio

Kivimäki and Grundström are working on the next Suistamon Sähkö album along with vocalists and dancers Tuomas Juntunen and Reetta-Kaisa Iles. This playful band offers her a different setting for her accordion work than her solo projects.

“I play with the same style and swing, but the compositions have more vocals and rapping as well as electronic music and effects,” she explains. “My own albums are more acoustic and instrumental, almost all performed live with musicians. It’s great to be doing two different projects, with the accordion playing a big part in both of them.”

Accordion trance

Kivimäki’s playing style has been dubbed ‘accordion trance’.

“For me, that means music that’s hypnotic, danceable, long-lasting, minimalist and based on improvisation, variation and riffs. Rhythm, swing and styles from old kantele and jouhikko tunes are important parts of accordion trance, along with my own vision of old Karelian dances, praasniekka village festivals and today’s dance raves,” Kivimäki explains.

She delved into early 20th-century music from various parts of Karelia, some of which are now beyond the Russian border, for her doctoral degree in 2013. For her first doctoral concert, she created her own music based on the maanitusand trepak traditions of the Ladoga Karelia region, including the municipality of Suistamo. The town was known for its runo singers and kantele players. 

The municipality of Suistamo in the Karelia region inspired the “Suistamo Electricity” band name. Photo: Katri Kallio

Kivimäki studied the traditions of Suistamo in her doctoral research, including a treasure trove of archive recordings of storyteller and accordionist Ilja Kotikallio, who was born in Suistamo in 1894.

Fragments of Kotikallio’s interviews are included on Kivimäki’s Closed-Down Village, which was honoured as Finland’s folk album of the year in 2015 as well as a German Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. The album also features Käppi and Rauhala as well as Timo Väänänen, who plays the nares-jux or Siberian lyre and Silja Palomäki, a vocalist, kantele player and clarinettist who will perform on Kotiin album release gigs next spring. On the record, Kivimäki plays the 5-row chromatic accordion as well as a Notka, a Soviet-made 2-row accordion. 

“It has a unique, wistful sound,” says Kivimäki. “It has light bellows, so it’s well suited for rhythmic playing.”

The Closed-Down Village project, which also included a multimedia exhibition, concerts and a book, combined her skills as a composer, performer and historical researcher. 

“The project brought out feelings of leaving home, evacuation journeys and nostalgia for Karelia in 1939–44. The archive material for my doctoral research led me to reflect on leaving home at the concerts and exhibition. That was in 2015 when there was a wave of refugees. It was wild to see how history repeats itself and how the world changed around art,” she says.

“Now, in 2024, the situation in Ukraine is so sad. The Russian war of aggression once again takes our thoughts back to 1939–44. I believe that music contains war traumas and accordions were played on both sides of the front, by Finns and Russians in those years.”

Anne-Mari Kivimäki blends Karelian roots, hypnotic rhythms, and cross-border collaborations into a versatile musical tapestry. Photo: Inka Hannula

Cross-border culture

Ties between artists and regular people from the two countries during the current war is a crucial, tangled issue for Kivimäki, who used to play often on the Russian side of the border and still maintains ties with musicians from long-repressed Finno-Ugric minorities such as Udmurts.

The issue of whether other Europeans should maintain any contact with Russians while its brutal war grinds on remains sensitive and controversial.

“It’s sad that the Finno-Ugric cooperation and the work I started with Russian artists has been interrupted,” Kivimäki says. “There are many artists and people from other fields who are in the same situation. This year, I took part in a project with an Udmurt band called Post-Dukes, who were collecting a playlist based on wedding traditions.” 

Together with Väänänen and vocalist Taito Hoffrén, they recorded “Häälaulu” (“Wedding Song”), which was published as part of the playlist. The compilation also includes musicians from Hungary, Estonia, Udmurtia and Moscow. 

“It is great that we can continue Finno-Ugric cooperation to some extent, at least at this distance,” says Kivimäki. 

Tragically, that was one of the final recordings by Hoffrén before his death at age 50 in October. He was known as a talented runo singer, composer, researcher, festival organiser and sound technician, including for some of Kivimäki’s albums and many on his own Ääniä record label.

Hoffrén also partnered with Kivimäki on the ‘Yli rajan liitää laulu’ radio programme. While condemning Russia’s assault on Ukraine, the show featured folk musicians from various Finno-Ugric ethnic groups in Russia – maintaining hope for a more peaceful, harmonious future.

Featured photo: Hanna Koikkalainen