When the rain stick and gentle strum come in with Finja Olsen’s all but wordless vocals at the beginning of “Calling You Home” by Olsen’s project FINJA it might make some listeners think of all that New Age/pagan music from the 80s and early 90s that was trying too hard to mix folk with alternative spiritual ideas. Like wannabe Patrick O’Hearn or Clannad. There is some of that here but upon further listening to the song it’s obvious that Olsen and her collaborators are willing to get a little weird as the track progresses with inventive use and processing of sounds like a toy piano and cajon to make for an array of sounds rich in texture and coming together in a complex but never over-complicated dynamics. And there’s no knocking the message about listening to your inner voice, the one connected to a benevolent collective unconscious, when it comes knocking on your conscious, sometimes overly locked into a stream of linear logic, and trust the messages from within, instinct as a tool to trust and have some faith in your own capacities freed of terror the Western cultural conditioning often has of the “irrational” and the dark side of the psyche. As Olsen sings, “fear and insecurity do not look good on thee,” a message inherent in some Eastern spiritual traditions as well as Western mysticism and a theme of Ursula K. Le Guin’s original Earthsea Trilogy in the reconciliation between the dark and the light side, the rational and the irrational. In so many ways it would be easy to dismiss this as some hokey hippie stuff but FINJA aims at a more cosmic perspective with the lyrics and personalizes them and grounds it in music that reflects the paradoxically myriad simplicity of our existence and our interconnectedness with the universe.
soundcloud.com/finjamusic
open.spotify.com/artist/7kvAsFqJkNtEA88L2GmsdC
instagram.com/lovefinjamusic
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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