BIO

Amelouk is mysterious and haunting, music pulled up from a sea of dreams, at the shining edge of the abyss. Its name comes from the Finnish word for death, kuolema, read backwards. The music has an experimental quality, teetering somewhere close to contemporary classical, with darkwave sensibilities.

​Olga Vähä-Piikkiö (based in Helsinki, Finland) is the mind behind Amelouk. Once a seasick marine physicist, she now trawls the deep recesses of her psyche for musical expression.

​Amethyst Mines is Amelouk’s debut album. On it acoustic piano and Vähä-Piikkiö’s classical-adjacent vocals form visions ranging from uneasy to ethereal, often both. The sound world is occasionally spiced with clarinet, saxophone, percussions and the lyre. The songs weave their own worlds with unusual harmonies and intricate tensions.

​Most songs on Amethyst Mines have taken a while to come together. Some of them have been brewing in Vähä-Piikkiö’s head for a decade, and most of them have been recorded and released on two previous EPs. However, Vähä-Piikkiö felt an obligation toward the songs to rerecord them all in better quality and to bring them together on one album.

​Amelouk’s first releases came in 2022 in form of a couple of electronic demos born out of sudden curiosity toward the process of further manipulating audio. Currently an electroacoustic album with varying instrumentation and lots more experimentation is in the works.