Tahmela Six - Alight (2026) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Endless Summer Sun
02. Time and Again
03. Ground VI
04. Alight

Ten catalogue numbers in, Tampere’s Mustik Motel imprint returns to where it began. Tahmela Six were the label’s first release — a sextet convened by engineer and co-founder Jarno Alho for a single midwinter session in December 2023 — and their debut, Mount, somehow escaped these pages at the time, an omission that returning to the record now makes hard to fathom: the title track remains the heart of that album, ‘Funus Parit’ runs it close, and both vinyl pressings are long gone. In between, the same pool of players has kept surfacing here in different configurations — Topias Tiheäsalo and Eero Tikkanen in Phardah, Janne Tuomi in Hatka, Eero Savela under his own name — a reminder that Finnish free improvisation operates as a community rather than a set of discrete bands. Alight, the sextet’s second album, gathers six of its threads back into one field.

This time literally so. Where Mount was taped indoors in the darkest week of the Finnish year, Alight was made in the open on the afternoon of 15 August 2025 at Palmutsaari farm in Kiikala, where the field meets the forest. No studio walls, no isolation: wind, insects and sheer distance are part of the record, and with nothing to bounce the sound back, the six are audibly listening to one another across open ground.

‘Endless Summer Sun’ opens side A across eleven minutes, and the first thing to catch my ear was an unusual string drone running throughout — a tanpura came to mind, and a bowed cello would make sense had the band carried one. My guess is Eero Tikkanen, unless the instruments went uncredited on the day; whatever its source, it adds so much interest to the piece’s underbelly. There is a classical feel to the arrangement and a flow that makes one concentrate on listening — a reflection on life, perhaps on its meaning. Not spiritual, but deep and rewarding.

‘Time and Again’ shifts the ground entirely. A guitar riff and edgy drumming set up something one might file under seventies prog, with a flavour of edgy sixties pop in there too, before the saxophone joins and the band in full force lifts everything to the level we have come to expect from Sami Sippola and Topias Tiheäsalo‘s previous work. This is jazz — it is simply their way of exciting us, and nothing about it is typical. Very much a standing-audience kind of groove: fabulous and exciting.

Side B opens with ‘Ground VI’, issued as a single at the end of April, and its riff feels familiar, harking back once again to seventies dynamics. Eero Savela shines here, though it is Topias Tiheäsalo who holds the piece together before the reeds steal the show.

The fifteen-minute title track closes the record and finally lets the shakuhachi out of the bag. It is a quirky start, and to my ears, the opening stretch carries more over-thinking than understanding; it is around the eight-minute mark that the band pull back together and heads out on a spiritual jazz finale worthy of the occasion.

One day, one place, six players: the ethos of the debut holds. This time, 600 copies have been pressed, and on the evidence of how quickly Mount disappeared, I would not wait. The band, the album and the label are creating something worth keeping.