“Music has always made me feel at ease when I’m anxious because of its communal nature,” he says. “Even if you don’t know the person who made the music, you feel connected to them when you listen to their work.”

As a musician, teacher, and ethnographer, Helsinki-based artist Aukio Sound is inspired by the seemingly contradictory social possibilities that electronic music enables: its ability to connect you to others and also the way it can foster deep solitary inner inquiry. It’s what defines and sets apart his music, including his new release on Futura Resistenza. The two singles, “Hode Medio” and “Sakpata,” and their versions, are driven by John Follas’ pristine, honeyed vocals which sound immediate and conversational, as if he’s in the room with you. But the dubby techno arrangements cocoon you in fog-like synth and a meditative beat that encourages the kind of introspection you only experience on a late night walk home alone.

Aukio Sound first got into DJing as a high schooler who loved the booming energy of drum n bass and reveled in sharing it with others on the dance floor. He spent the next few decades working collaboratively in multiple bands, and also started working as a visual arts teacher. “Music has always made me feel at ease when I’m anxious because of its communal nature,” he says. “Even if you don’t know the person who made the music, you feel connected to them when you listen to their work.”

In 2013, he and his bandmates were doing a 5-week residency in Grand-Popo, Benin studying another intensely collective custom: voodou. They attended rituals, spoke with priests there, and got to know musicians who performed at them. Aukio Sound was inspired by the ways not only multiple people, but also multiple artistic endeavors coalesce in the ceremonies. “In a voodou ceremony, there's singing, drumming, and dancing,” he says. “It’s also like theater. There’s also poetry and food. So it's an artform that you experience with every sense.”

As far-reaching and communal as it is, it’s also a practice that also encourages a more solitary relationship to music, which Aukio Sound found just as intriguing. “It is a practice that can result in people getting into a trance,” he says “It changed me to see that. I was very interested in studying how people achieve it.”

While in Grand-Popo, Aukio Sound met singer John Follas, who was bartending at a bar that Aukio Sound would frequent. They decided to record music together, so Aukio Sound quickly built some beats on a small sampler he had on him. Over the course of a day during his last week in Grand-Popo, Aukio Sound recorded 6 tracks alongside Follas. Each vocal track was recorded in one take. Aukio Sound then came back to Helsinki and spent 5 years teaching himself to use Ableton in order to create fuller, more complex arrangements that matched the tenor of the vocals.

The music pulled quite literally from his time in Grand-Popo. He was interested in polyrhythms employed in West African music, and “Hode Medio” employs a triplet beat common in voodou. He also appreciated the experience of being submerged in the village and living among its people, and both tracks sample field recordings from Grand-Popo and its surrounding villages. But he was also influenced more broadly from the trance-like, introspective quality of the practice, crafting music that helps you “get your thoughts out of this mess that is life and focus on just one thing,” he says. “It’s relaxing to lose everything else for a while.”

As he crafted these arrangements, he listened to music from groups like German duo Rhythm & Sound, who are famous for combining techno’s repetitive minimalism with Jamaican dub reggae’s more spacious, echoey reverb to pioneer the genre of dub techno. The arrangements Aukio Sound made similarly oscillate between pulsing and floating, grounded and mystical. On “Hode Medio,” a padded, woody beat dances with a playful synth melody, evoking both a pair of boots marching determinedly through a forest and the ineffable twinkling of the stars in the night sky above. And on “Sakpata,” Follas’ vocals, modulated through echoey reverb, bend and twist like the wind as the beat continues to amble forward steadfastly and intrepidly.

This is music as focused as it is whimsical, as intent on exploration as it is content to explore the sound and emotions of a single moment in time. It is music born out of the deep introspection of one artist and one vocalist, but that extends its reach outward too, that welcomes us all in.