PUG LIFE
Lauri Hyvärinen electric guitar
Taneli Viitahuhta saxophone
Ilia Belorukov electronic drums

with Matvei Ilyich electronic drums on "Metallurge (Regular)"

Pug Life began as the experimental improvisatory duo of Lauri Hyvärinen (electric guitar) and Taneli Viitahuhta (saxophone). They worked on their debut album during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The music was recorded according to the procedures of social distancing; the musicians playing in different studios and recording their tracks separately. The ensuing "L’Année Perrotique" was released on CD by Juho Toivonen’s Akti Records in March 2021. The album turned out to be an attempt to merge improvisation and compositional elements, to map out various kinds of soundscapes that just two players can achieve.

Having mixed and mastered that first record, Ilia Belorukov was invited to contribute musically to Pug Life. The three continued to record during 2021, when restrictions on social gatherings were still off and on. Ilia’s presence brought a geographical and textural permutation to the Pug Life equation, as Lauri and Taneli, both Helsinki-based musicians, started to work with Ilia, from St. Petersburg, providing electronic tracks to their electric and acoustic sounds.

They soon discovered that Pug Life had entered another new level of dialectics. One of their original goals had been to find immediacy in improvisation by erecting barriers, both sonic and conceptual. Now the liberation from notation turned out to be a way to defend one’s organic way of balancing sounds against composition, while composition acted as a creative way of imposing new restrictions on musical freedom, often rooted in habituality.

The title "Autiofiktio" includes a pun: 'Auto' is of course derived from the Greek word meaning 'self', and 'autofiktio' is Finnish for 'autofiction'. Literary terms such as autofiction can be employed in musical environments for metaphoric purposes. For example, maybe compositional improvisation could be considered a way of mapping one's own resources and reflecting on how they came about, not dissimilar to autofiction, which blends autobiography (telling it "how it was") and narrative structure (fiction) without giving away the rules and architectural measures followed by the author. "Autiofiktio" adds to this idea one crucial letter, 'i'. The word 'autio' is an archaic Germanic remnant of Finnish language, meaning something that is desolate, forsaken, forlorn or uninhabited.

In a sense then, if Pug Life is a form of fiction (and why not), the band’s efforts with "Autiofiktio" mark the birth of a musical genre where fiction is accepted as part of our musical imagination. However, Pug Life tries to work against given ideas of narrative, plotline, tension and release. If Pug Life tracks are in a sense stuck in a rut, they don’t lack resources or creativity. Their music is imagination in a pure state - derelict fiction.