“Our learned tendency to categorize and compartmentalize music — in order to understand, appreciate and enjoy it — is useless here. Nothing about this music is typical... His music asked me to rid myself of preconceptions, to become a more acute listener.”
—Eric Snider, JazzTimes (USA)

sayr: kaiho – live in helsinki presents the continued improvised evolution of the materials uncovered on sayr: salt | thirst.

Performed on steel-string acoustic guitar and the Arabic ‘ud and recorded and filmed live in concert at Musiikkitalo, Helsinki, Finland, on September 19th, 2025, the album is divided into three arcs – “halla” (“frost” in Finnish); “fes” (in homage to the Moroccan medina where he bought his first oud); and “vielä” (“yet” in Finnish).

With “kaiho” referring to longing or nostalgia in Finnish – akin to “saudade” in Portuguese and Galician –, this live recording highlights to stunning effect Reijonen’s deep relationships with the sonorities of two string instruments that not only have become so entangled with his own memories, but also share between them a deep historical lineage.

SAYR
sayr is an exploration of the small, the simple and the sparse; the rugged earthy; the gnarly unpretty; and most of all, of memories of roots and branches; of bare feet in soil; and of paths less – or differently – predetermined.

Rooted in a metaphorical reframing of the concept of “sayr” as found in Arabic music — a musical pathway or unfolding, literally “course” or “motion” —, this solo improvisation becomes a spontaneous exploration through an acoustemological memory palace: a pathway of memory recalled and reimagined through music.

Using a set of pre-composed musical gestures as loci or touchstones — like rooms in a memory palace — Reijonen navigates freely between them through improvisation. Each gestural locus becomes a portal, awakening acoustemological imagines shaped by his life across Northern Finland, Jordan, Tanzania, Oman, Lebanon, and the United States: mirrored echoes of Frances A. Yates’ “forms, marks, simulacra of what we wish to remember” refracting in reverse in the space between sound and personal experience.