“Call for My Soul” (Hanna Ojala song) – Queen City Sounds and Art

HannaOjala_MainPic1_Crop — Hanna Ojala, photo courtesy the artist

Every time Finnish sound artist Hanna Ojala’s releases a single you’re in for a unique experience and one that doesn’t often draw immediate comparisons with other songwriters. With “Call for My Soul” you can’t help but imagine sepia toned landscapes and a structuralist film aesthetic like Wim Wenders and Laurie Anderson collaborating on a film about a great journey to a place where you face your darkest fears and embrace your greatest dreams. Her vocals, like spoken word free verse poetry, uses repetition to emphasize the emotional experience of memory and a yearning to reconnect with one’s core and one’s sense of identity and self-value. The poem moves over a layered ambient drone and impressionistic piano as though the song was informed by a visual sense of storytelling and the vocals and music echo slightly like deeply subconscious connections lapping at the shores of your waking mind and nourishing an awareness of what might soothe a sometimes faint sometimes powerful sense of unease at being out of balance with who you are. Probably everyone has this sense of existing in a way and in a social context that does not nurture who we are but pushes us toward what seems most “useful” or efficient as if our existence is only justified by its utility to an economic system, an ideology or some other dominant belief system imposed on everyone. Ojala’s song suggests that you can harbor within you an independent sense of self-value from the cruelty and disconnectedness of the world and in doing so recognize and encourage the same in others. Listen to “Call for My Soul” on YouTube and connect with Hanna Ojala at the links below.