miska lamberg makes ambient music from the world as it exists, not how we wish it sounded. Their debut album Evening, window gathers overlooked moments (rainfall, distant traffic, animal calls, etc.), weaving them into compositions that feel both intimately familiar and mysteriously transformed. I recognize this sonic space even though I’ve never been here before. There’s a deep melancholy running through these pieces, each one unfolding like an aural still life that somehow glows from within. lamberg’s approach to field recording resonates with me, especially how they embrace the inescapable sounds of modern life rather than editing them out. Traffic hum and electrical buzz become keynote sounds that drift through these compositions, taking new forms as they intertwine with blurred melodies and ambient textures. The album captures something essential about living in a world where silence doesn’t exist, where even our quietest moments are threaded with the sounds of anthrophony, and lamberg turns that reality into something luminous.
Evening, window is OUT NOW on Dragon’s Eye Recordings. miska’s website is HERE.
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What are some of your earliest memories with sound? When did you first become aware of the sonic world around you in a way that felt significant?
This is such a tough question for me, as my memories are quite vague from my earlier years. I can’t recall any sonic memories when I was like three years old or something like that. One very significant memory, though, was when in the 5th grade we had a new teacher who was enthusiastic about music, and through that I found my interest in playing instruments and stuff. So, in a music class, we were learning how to play guitar by practicing I Will Stay by the Hurriganes. We were going step by step, just playing one string and eventually “rock chords”, as the teacher said. I had to take a look on the internet just right now what would be the correct name for rock chords, and they seem to be called power chords. For me, they’ve been rock chords from the beginning and will be until the end. Thinking of music, even before all this, I was a super fan of the band Fröbelin Palikat, which is a Finnish children’s music band. I even had merch, at least a t-shirt, and there’s also a home video of me absolutely jamming in their concert as a kid.
I think the moment when I became consciously more aware of the sonic world was quite late, when I moved from my hometown to Helsinki about 6–7 years ago. I come from a significantly smaller city, so Helsinki has always felt busy and bustling to me. There’s a lot going on all the time, and that contributes to higher levels of noise, which made me realize, like, wow, all this feels tough to take in, but this is also very interesting. Not long after that, I picked up my first field recorder and started recording everything.
You describe yourself as being sensitive to noise. Can you talk about what that sensitivity feels like and how it shaped your path toward working with sound?
Noisy environments are a lot to take, especially when I’m feeling even a bit tired. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind when there are too many sounds around me, and sometimes it even feels physically painful. My ears can start to feel very sensitive, and I can feel the eardrum moving, which doesn’t feel nice at all. If there are some almost inaudible, but still loud, low-frequency sounds, it feels annoying to feel my ears popping.
I’m glad I live in a much quieter area right now, because here stepping outside feels nice and calm compared to other places I’ve lived in Helsinki, when the moment you step outside the door, the audible world is so rich and full, but here it is sweet and calm. Because of my current environment, I feel like I’m able to handle noisier places a bit better now, too, which is nice.
Now that I think about sensitivity, it doesn’t necessarily always mean high decibel levels. There are some sounds that I can’t handle at all. I get so irritated by them that I feel like I’m going to explode haha. For example, sounds of somebody eating, typing on keyboard during class, and now during winter, walking indoors on studded shoes. I also feel bad about reacting negatively to these sounds since they’re so basic and just something people do and have to do. I’ve told my partner that they can like eat and pour water anyway they want, it’s my job to use earplugs or headphones to handle those sounds, but they’re so sweet and always very thoughtful about my misophonic tendencies. I’m really thankful for that. It was through The Koreatown Oddity’s song Misophonia Love, where I learned that this is a real thing, there’s a term to this, and there are other people who feel the same.
When did you first start recording the sounds around you? What prompted that shift from listening to capturing?
As I mentioned before, it wasn’t long after I moved to Helsinki, maybe six years ago or so. Actually, around when COVID-19 hit here. I think it was through getting more familiar with sound art and just digging deeper and trying to understand some specific type of art works. I got into these works that wouldn’t traditionally be considered very musical and noticed that many artists that I really enjoyed had mentioned the use of field recordings. I remember that at first, I just thought that “field recordings” as words just looked and sounded really cool, so I had to look into that. After that, I learned what the term means, and I got interested in recording myself. I consider myself a listener first, so it was through listening to interesting sound pieces and wanting to understand them a bit more that I got into field recording myself.
Your approach involves sound recycling rather than creating new sounds from scratch. What drew you to this practice? How does it connect to your broader environmental concerns?
I’m glad you asked. The term and philosophy are still shaping up, but I’ll try to open my mind as well as I’m able to. First of all, this thought is deeply rooted in noise pollution and environmental concerns. Because I can get really overwhelmed by noisy environments, I wanted to start capturing that and recontextualizing those to something much quieter and tolerable for my own sake and sanity. And because the noise at times feels too much for me to take in, I want to use already existing sounds instead of creating new ones from scratch, so I wouldn’t be adding to the noise. And here we come to a point where we can see that my theory isn’t spotless and perfect at all. Obviously, I create more sounds when I move all that to my DAW or sampler and manipulate it, export it, and share it. That’s why I think of it more as a philosophy or guidance to my practice, sort of like a framework that helps me to narrow things down. With all the options available nowadays, one can get really overwhelmed by all that. It’s important to me to have those kinds of limits or boundaries to what I do, otherwise I probably wouldn’t get anything done. I like to call it sound recycling because the use of the term recycling is closely related to environmental sustainability, and recycling, after all, basically means that you’re giving some discarded or already used material a new chance. For me, in this context, it happens to be sounds.
You work with the collective KATOAVA on local environmental issues. How does that direct activism intersect with your sound work? Are they separate practices or different expressions of the same core values?
With KATOAVA’s short films, we have been trying to take a stand on behalf of forests that have been under threat of being demolished. Besides myself, KATOAVA’s sort of like main members are Iida Nikander, who’s a choreographer, dancer, producer, and basically everything else you can think of, and also Vesi, who films and edits our stuff, and then on different projects we’ve worked with a bunch of other people. Our latest short film, Hämärässä kuulen sen, miltä suljen silmäni (eng. In the dusk, i hear what i close my eyes from) focused and was filmed in the old-growth forest of Stansvik, which the City of Helsinki has decided to cut down and instead build new apartments and stuff there. It’s kind of crazy that this is happening all the time here, since the public image of Finland is that we love nature and want to protect it. I guess it’s so until the point money comes talking. I’ve started to feel like, if something on paper is called protected, such as nature reserves, it doesn’t take much to bypass all that.
I mean, these kinds of environmental issues are on my mind constantly, and it is my core value to try and live as sustainably as I can. I haven’t set foot on a plane for at least ten years, I eat plant-based food, I try to cycle or walk everywhere, and so on. Because my life is like this, the topic of nature conservation is automatically baked into my sound work too.
Can you talk about the never-silent surroundings you mention? What does it mean to live in a world without silence, and how does that reality inform your work?
There was a point in my life when I was incredibly exhausted and burnt out. That’s when being around people, around noise, was too much to handle. I started looking for silence, some place where I couldn’t hear anything human-made. But there’s no escaping the motorized traffic or planes in the city. My ears got so tuned to those sounds because I was trying to escape them, and eventually, I realized that I must, for my own sake, just accept that they’re going to be there. It was like I was looking for quiet so much that the quiet got louder.
Earlier in my field recordings, I tried to avoid all that noise from traffic and such, trying to find a quiet place or using postprocessing to get rid of it all. I wasn’t successful at that, and then I came up with the idea that maybe I should try to make these sounds my own; I have to make use of them for my own benefit. When I started intentionally recording those environments and treating them as good material to manipulate into something more tolerable, I started to feel more relieved mentally and physically, and even enjoyed some of those sounds.
This is your debut full-length album. What felt different about approaching a full album versus shorter works or performances? How did you think about the album as a complete piece?
For years and years, I had worked on all kinds of music and sound stuff, but kept them stuffed in my own archives. Starting songs, but never really finishing them. Then came collaborative projects, which were nice to work on during those times, but they never felt 100% me. We worked on a few projects together and shared a residency with a good friend and artist, Aliina Kemppainen, and held endless talks about how scary it feels to get that first release out. It is a big thing to put yourself out to the world, since sound work for me is extremely personal. Because expressing myself is what I love about this music thing, I got to the point that I decided that I had to complete a project that felt totally me. Making these songs for this album during pretty dark times was also a way to try to handle all those emotions.
I had enjoyed finding and making these emotional, melancholic loops from bits and pieces, and it just felt right that they should be the starting point and main thing on the album, around which everything else would be built. I started digging for sounds and eventually came up with tens of loops, which I reduced down to six for the album, which I felt worked well together. When before I would’ve just made these songs and be like, “Cool, let’s make another one”, this time I kept in my mind that I want to compile these into a full album. Having that intention, that goal of making an album in my mind while working on this project, made the process much different and more rewarding for me.
Especially after the album listening event I held here in Helsinki, the support I received from my close ones felt so special. It has been really moving to hear comments from people about how the themes of the album have resonated with so many. So yeah, I’m really happy that I was able to do this and super thankful to Yann Novak for how warmly he welcomed me to his label and that he wanted to release the album through Dragon’s Eye Recordings.
The track titles on Evening, window read like fragments of loss and memory: “Half-memories absorb us,” “The strings that hold now to then, snapped,” “I remember the day the world lost color.” Where did these titles come from? What were you feeling or thinking about when you named these pieces?
For this project, every single sound is “found”, and I also wanted to extend that idea to everything else on the album, too. So, for the titles, I was just reading or scanning through some books, looking for words that would evoke a type of feeling in me that you described. I just took and wrote down a bunch of words from various sources and started staring at them and compiling them together. Eventually, I ended up with the track titles as well as the album title.
This thinking of creating everything from already existing materials is also further extended for the limited physical USB edition, in which the cases are made from old book covers and pages. I wasn’t able to source all the USB sticks second-hand, unfortunately, so I had to buy a few new ones.
Thinking about what winter in Finland is like… How does that seasonal reality shape the emotional landscape of this album? Were these pieces made during winter, or does winter live in them regardless?
They were indeed made during wintertime. I’m sure the long, dark winters in Finland affect anyone living here. Like, if you have sunlight for two hours for months, or not at all, like up north of the country, obviously, you won’t be getting enough vitamin D, and that drains you. Even more than the cold winter, it was the mental state I was in that influenced the way the album sounds. Those times were rough, and making this kind of music felt like a way to process those feelings. I tried to understand why I felt the way I did, but couldn’t figure that out inside my head or put it into words. Music and sound have always had a big emotional effect on me, so I tried putting my feelings into my own music this time around. I feel like I accomplished that quite well, and it feels pretty surreal that the feedback I’ve received suggests that these feelings and themes have been felt by others, too.
Throughout the years, you’ve been compiling audio recordings of your daily life. How long have you been gathering the sounds that appear on this album? Are there recordings here from years ago?
Most of the recordings were made close to the time I was working on the songs, so from 2024 to early 2025. I make recordings based on feel, so if I know I’m working on a certain project, the recordings I make during those times usually work better with what I’m trying to do than if I use recordings from years back. Of course, I also listen to what I’ve recorded before if there’s a specific sound or place I’m looking for. For this album, I think the oldest field recording used is from 2022–23, but the very oldest recording is from the 1950s.
I also work on projects that are fully based on field recordings, and those might focus on a single sound source, such as ventilation, and then I obviously go hunting for those sounds. With, for example, ventilation recordings, I realized at some point, like gosh, I’ve recorded so much of these, but I’m not sure why. I was wondering what it is that has pulled me towards these sounds. Then I was like, “Oh yeah, these are like wind instruments, these are great drones, the resonances are amazing.” I took a bunch of recordings and started to collage them together in the hope of finding some good use for them, and I did. Just a note for those who think this sounds interesting, there’s a project coming out later this year, where one composition is based solely on these ventilation sounds.
I love the description of your work, comparing it to collage art, and how you put together existing elements to create new contexts. When you’re gathering field recordings, what are you listening for? How do you know when a sound wants to be part of something larger?
I already tackled these questions a bit just before. So, the most important thing when I decide to press record is that the sounds that I’m recording have to make me feel something. It can be excitement, intrigue, irritation, beauty, and so on. Lately, as I’ve been walking around places, I’ve started paying more attention to resonances. This type of material has given me some nice sounds to play with, to try and enhance some frequencies on the recordings to turn them together into something more harmonic. This has been a very useful and interesting way of trying to find new ways to use field recordings, as currently I’m trying not to use any synths or other instruments like that.
Then, as I’m working on a project and feeling that this is missing this very particular textural sound, I try to go and find that somewhere in the field. I prefer going out listening and looking for sounds instead of creating that myself even if I know I could just take those dry leaves and step on them to create this texture I’m looking for. I don’t know, maybe I just feel like it’s more rewarding when I find something compared to making it by myself. It makes me feel excited.
Lastly, as always to close, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Very light snow or rain on a dry forest bed, my partner sleeping, my family speaking, the first birds of the spring, foghorns, pipe organ, the tiniest creek…
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