Combining music and visual arts in a never-seen-before package that deepens the album experience. Despite being an active artist for over two decades, “Totuus on mun soihtu” in Mängi’s first solo album. He describes it as an outlet for his creativity with commercial appeal absolutely not considered at all. A very unique album that sounds nothing like what everyone else is doing. The music is only one half of the concept. The other half is the abstract visual art by Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki, who is originally from Poland. The visual artist made a piece or art inspired by and connected to each of the 7 songs on the album. As she speaks only rudimentary Finnish, the pieces were inspired by the sound and textures of the songs.
In practice the concept was as follows: The guest would listen to the album from start to finish and as each song was playing, they would look at the corresponding piece of art and read the lyrics. As Mängi puts it: “I wanted to figure out a new way to present the work so that listeners would really focus on the music. Nowadays we mostly listen to music in the background and don’t really deeply focus on it. And as hard as I’ve tried, I haven’t found another event like this, so this might have been the first Album Release Exhibition in the world! The feedback has been very good and a lot of the guests said that it really gave new meaning to the songs.”
The pair of artists actually met at the HCP office where the exhibition was held at an earlier event. Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki exhibited some of her work with Artkoti and Mängi really enjoyed her visual style and the two talked about art and Natalia’s process at length. When it was time to choose visuals for his album, Mängi remembered Kozieł-Kalliomäki and asked if she wanted to collaborate on the album’s visual representation. She was immediately into the idea and the project got started. The idea to display the cover art for the singles as an art exhibition came later, but – while unique – it’s a very logical step forward.