Music / Sounds

Sound-based musical practices, works-in-progress and selected recordings.

I work as a composer and musician whose practice begins from the body and the breath. My work with music unfolds through embodied listening, voice, and traditional instruments: long flute, lävikkö (a Karelian clarinet-like instrument), reed pipe, and the traditional wooden-pegged kantele.

These instruments resist Western equal temperament. Their tones are often unstable, shifting, and deeply bound to material, breath, and the physical state of the player. I am drawn to this resistance, to musical qualities that cannot be fully controlled, fixed, or standardised, and that carry the pulse of natural materials and living processes.

Rather than composing towards closed or final forms, my musical and compositional practice unfolds through listening, repetition, and waiting. I work with melodies, timbres, and gestures that have life: musical material that stays with me even when it is not immediately recorded or notated. This way of composing moves between experimental folk practices and contemporary music, treating sound as relational, embodied, and situated in space rather than as a self-contained musical object.

My current work includes a choral composition that grows from somatic practice and collective listening. The process moves between bodily sensing, vocal exploration, symbolic imagery, and musical material. Images and relations — circles, nests, contrasts between heaviness and flight, proximity and distance — often emerge before harmonic or formal decisions. I am interested in how a score might position performers in relation to each other, to space, and to the music, rather than dictate fixed outcomes.

In this work, I combine musical notation with graphic scoring. The graphic score functions as a shared field of attention — a compositional and ritual structure that supports collective presence and embodied transmission. I am particularly interested in how a score might call forth the performer’s own embodied musical knowing, instead of asking them to reproduce something I have invented.

This page gathers selected recordings, sketches, and works-in-progress. They are not presented as definitive versions, but as traces of an ongoing musical practice.

Listening samples / Works-in-progress

Heitä miulle mustat mullat (2025)

Music by Inkeri Kurkilahti & trad.
Traditional lyrics (Larin paraske).

Earlier collaborations & Releases

Sodan kuvaus

As a composer and singer in Karjalaine Iäni short film by Anne Kalliola and working group based on the runosong Sodan Kuvaus text trad./ Ika Anni, composer and performer Inkeri Kurkilahti

Käärmikkä – Suvet ulvoot suon perällä EP (Art Safari records, 2021)

An EP from my earlier band project, blending contemporary folk expression with the traditional lyrics of Larin Paraske. I contribute both vocals and traditional flutes. More solo and collaborative recordings will be added here soon.