Music diary, Feb 18, 2026
Teija Niku is one of Finland’s leading folk musicians. She plays the chromatic button accordion, that massive thing with a zillion tiny buttons, with stupendous skill, style and passion. I’ve heard her playing live and it’s just mesmerizing what someone can get out of an instrument that looks like a piece of space hardware.
Tovi (old Finnish for a brief moment of time) is her fourth solo album and there’s just her, no band. All her original compositions in the style of “modern folk” or whatever you call this trad-based contemporary instrumental music.
I like this a lot, because of the quality of the tunes, her impeccable and emotional playing and also because this soooo Finnish you couldn’t have this coming from anywhere else.
The dominant mood is not downright bleak or depressingly gloomy, but it is autumnal, wistful, resilient, simmering, quietly glowing… It’s the quiet aspect of Finnish “sisu”.
Sisu is often slightly misunderstood as only something aggressive and sweaty and masculine (re: the recent ultra-violent but fun Sisu action movies) but it’s also about patience, silent hardiness, taking things as they are, making it through yet another dark winter… and that’s what I hear on Tovi.
That’s also why minor chords abound in our trad music, and they do here as well, but there’s resolve and trust and hope in here too, if you listen closely. The often fairly slow music on Tovi is not a black wall of melancholy; it’s more like a Finnish forest at twilight, a living organism that looks dark and silent but when you approach it, you realize it’s full of life and sounds and sunlight flashing among the trees.
Like the forest, Tovi does not pull you in, but it invites you to enter. Go ahead, it can be an adventure!
Favorite tracks: Paholaisen polska (The Devil’s Polska, “polska” is a Finnish second cousin of the polka) and Elokuu (August)
FolkNotes 