In August 2023 Rent Romus and Heikki Koskinen traveled from California and reunited with their touring band the 6-piece Otherworld Ensemble in Finland. The ensemble that year featured vocalist and cultural researcher Heikki Laitinen, and members of the trio The Mystic Revelation of Teppo Repo performing ten concerts in nine different cities presenting music from Romus and Koskinen’s Itkuja Suite (invocations on lament).

"The tour launched on August 5th, 2023. Next day was the first performance at the Blueberry Hill Festival, in Ilomantsi, North Karelia on the Russian border. The Californians brought the mystical-spiritual musical message back to their home – and was very well received by the audience, which connected joyfully to their cultural unconscious. On Day 11 of the tour at a modern church in Oulunkylä, Helsinki, the concert was surprisingly attended by Pirkko Fihlman, a legend, who has given courses of invocations on lament to more than 2,000 persons. This shows that this ancient tradition is not held only by a chosen few but has started its revitalization from the 1990s onwards. On Day 16, the sextet performed with exceptional energy in Poleeni, at the hall of the cultural center of the city of Pieksämäki, to a chosen few. This you can witness on tracks 1 and 5–8. My favorites are Koskinen’s Rungoteus (tr. 5), which reflects his fascination with the spirit of rye. The other, Rent’s and Mikko Innanen’s Suurimaa (tr. 6) performed live at the Telakka Club in Tampere – an untranslatable title refers to all the physical and spiritual Karelian and other Finno-Ugric nations which could form an existing Grand Country. This is Rent’s tribute to these groups of people, who are currently “under some form of oppression, and are landless”. At the end (tr. 8) Heikki Laitinen prays thankfully for the audience of Pieksämäki “to love each other”. What a trip, circa 2,250 miles, had it made! African American Jazz and invocations on lament have three factors in common. The first is the free-flowing improvisation beyond musical and poetic meters. Secondly, in their original sense, the social function of jazz and invocations was to help the survival, the resilience and the perseverance of the community and its members. Thirdly, the roots of jazz and invocations on lament precede the Christian worldview and, at least for me, exceed it culturally. As mental figures, they bring death and the ancestors back to life. The improvisers and invocators on laments work as mediators between the mundane and spiritual world. In the words of invocators from the Viena Karelia: Kalman kanšua noššetah, we are to wake up the dead."
– From the liner notes by Markku “Jazz Preacher” Salo

Heikki "Mike" Kosikinen - kantele, tenor recorder, e-trumpet
Rent Romus - flute, alto saxophone
Heikki Laitinen - kantele, vocals
Otto Eskelinen – alto sax, bandoneon, shakuhachi, flutes
Eero Tikkanen – double bass
Arwi Lind – log drums, percussion Markku Salo – oratory



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