News — Early 2023

On Midsummer 2023 — in Finland, the great festival of summer light and summer nights and hopes and dreams of love and happiness — I decided to make the full sheet music for the culminating section called “Love” from An Iceland Symphony available on this site for free viewing and download. I hope this may help prospective performers — musical organisations — orchestras, discover this piece. You can find it on the Sheet Music page.

My book At Dawn: Early Short Stories just got the most wonderful review on Amazon and Goodreads. The review was written by Nicole Etter, and she also created this beautiful graphic.

I feel extremely fortunate, as very few writers can ever have received such a brilliantly written first review for their first book of fiction. It touched me deeply to read these sensitive and insightful words from this fantastic writer.

With her kind permission, I’ve shared the review also on my site. You can find it on the Writing page and as text only on Amazon and Goodreads. Heartfelt thanks, Nicole!

My second album, Tales from the North, Book I, is now available worldwide for purchase and streaming in 150+ places. See the Music I page for more on this album.

Released my second album of music, Tales from the North, Book I, on Bandcamp. It consists of 12 pieces for two pianos and pianists. This music will also later be published as sheet music, as my own versions are above all a delivery system for introducing this music to the world. See the Music I page for more.

Updated the site with hardcover photos of all my books available in that format (as all future ones will also be), replacing or removing most of the paperback images. You can find these new hardcover photos both in logical places on the various subpages and also in the photo galleries at the bottom of many of the pages.

On the 3rd anniversary of my podcast, released the second of the two new episodes of What Now with Simo featuring Pierre Estève. As with our earlier episodes in 2021 (see the Podcast page), all the music in these episodes was composed and performed by Pierre. 

Much of it can be bought on Bandcamp, but as a special treat and perfect anniversary gift to me and all listeners, this second part also includes a lot of music so far unreleased on any album, with some of the pieces appearing here for the first time anywhere. 

These episodes with Pierre have been an absolute joy for me — the kind of thing I could only dream about when starting my podcast in Iceland back in March 2020. Pierre has always given me a free hand in editing our episodes — though naturally we work closely together to get final results we both feel happy with — and some of the most thrilling moments for me have involved the choices involved in juxtaposing speech and music in ways that add up to something greater than the sum of the parts.

Truly a fascinating process with endless creative potential.

Started season 5 of my podcast What Now with Simo. As with season 4, all episodes of this season will feature some other audio elements than only speech, whether music or environmental sounds or both. In the first episode (5.1: “Nordic Insights, Future Plans, and Past and Present”) these include the ambience of a café, where I had stopped for tea. With this season I also introduced new cover art featuring an image from my upcoming visual art project Sky Mandalas.