Footprints by Tuomo Puranen

Tuomo Puranen releases a full-length album called Footprints through the new Finnish label Elektrokuutio, which focuses on ambient and music for liminal spaces. Footprints, an album of cinematic introspections and eerie reveries, is the first solo album by Tuomo Puranen.

Tuomo Puranen (b. 1963) is a film composer and electronic musician based in Helsinki, Finland. Firmly rooted in the Finnish underground and electronic music scenes by association with acts and artists such as The Elevators, Op:l Bastards, K-X-P, Jimi Tenor and Brandi Ifgray, Tuomo Puranen has, in recent decades, carved out a niche for himself as a composer of music for film, television, media art, radio and commercials often working with a fellow visionary soul, Timo Kaukolampi. Their soundtrack collaborations include such TV series as White Wall and Mister 8, and feature films Maria's Paradise and The Euthanizer, for which they won the Jussi Award for Best Original Soundtrack in 2018.

Consisting of twelve approximately three-minute pieces, Footprints is a testament to an unmatched ear for detail, with quirky subtleties scanning the implicit reaches of musical expression while poking wormholes in the matrix of aural perception. In spite of their slowly accumulating structures and deadpan disposition, the compositions are anything but devoid of ambiguous dexterity and tingling microtonal resonances set in a hauntingly estranged milieu. Puranen writes uncannily mind-bending, albeit weirdly grounded minimalist compositions which are executed in his Helsinki-based studio with what he describes as "a plethora of tone-producing electronic devices".

The pieces on Footprints were distilled from a larger body of music originally commissioned by the Finnish Broadcast Company for the radio programme Outopodcast, a programme delving into ghost stories and supernatural occurrences. Footprints was curated and post-produced by Antti Uusimäki and Pekka Jääskeläinen at Ambience Studios, Helsinki in 2024.