Why am I here? Where am I headed? What is life, the universe and everything?

 

These are the questions driving Finnish musician Lauri Järvilehto’s new album NORTH STAR REVISITED. The album is on the one hand an expedition to 1980s and 1990 synthpop, on the other hand to the heart of being human, all along telling stories about aliens, ghosts, amnesiac androids and space travel.

 

The roots of the album are with the Polaris concerts Järvilehto and his high school friends organized in Oulu, Finland. The concerts launched his career in music in mid-1990s. The genres of the album are quite similar to these concerts 27 years ago. In addition to classic synthpop, the album has been inspired by sound exploring cross over artists like St. Vincent, David Bowie, Kate Bush and Björk. Inspiration for the lyric have been drawn in addition to Bowie and Bush from for example Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan – not to forget the science fiction and fantasy literature Järvilehto dearly loves.

 

Järvilehto has gone through many kinds of life paths, first a as musician, then researcher, entrepreneur, writer, startup founder and ultimately to the current role as a Professor of Practice at Aalto University in Finland. At the same time the questions of one’s own identity and direction in life are still as topical as they were in the 1990s while finishing high school. 

 

Maybe there are no answers to these questions after all? Maybe the voyage to the North Star happens in life again and again, as some kind of an eternal return.

 

The North Star, Stella Polaris, is a group of three stars 323 light years away that are positioned in the middle of the night sky as the tail of the constellation Ursa Minor. The North Star has been for centuries an essential fixed point for navigation – and it’s also a common metaphor for finding a way for one’s life.