Mi And L’au / S/t

Young God

Mi and L’au recently put the finishing touches on their beautiful new album in Brooklyn, NY. The music on their self-titled debut is austere yet simultaneously warm, expressing the passion they possess both as human beings and as songwriters. Think of a glacier with a red ember glowing in its center.   Mi was working as a model in Paris when he met L’au, then involved in the French music industry. The two intensely focused individuals immediately fell in love, and after apartment-hopping around the city for a time, gave up everything and moved to the woods of Mi’s native Finland to spend time discovering each other and their music. They now live in a small cabin in complete isolation with the barest of essentials, spending virtually all their time making music together in solitude. They are pure and gentle souls (indeed, Devendra Banhart’s song “Gentle Soul” was written for L’au with whom he’d collaborated in Paris).   Their music is bare and delicate, with simple instrumentation and sparse orchestrations. I wouldn’t say it compares at all to the current crop of “weird folk,” though. Rather, it has the naked quality of certain early Nico recordings, soulful and elegant, without being touchy-feely or confessional. Their music reminds me of how one might imagine a Finnish winter landscape, haunting and pure.  The song outlines were recorded in Mi and L’au’s cabin in Finland and then moved to Brooklyn where the duo embellished the tracks with help from co-producer M.Gira and guests Akron/Family, Julia Kent (Antony and the Johnsons), Paul Cantelon, and Jerome O’Brien.

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