Antti Paalanen (FI)

Do you remember Antti Paalanen, the Finnish accordion player who played everyone's hat at the Farsund Folk Festival in 2012? Now he is finally coming back to us!

Antti Paalanen has been prominent in Finnish contemporary folk music for a number of years. He makes his music on two lines, using new techniques and new expressive timbres to expand the potential of the instrument, and he plays with a variety of genres.

Paalanen comes from South Osterbotten, a region in western Finland rich in the pelimanni ('traditional musician') tradition of Finnish folk music. Between 1989 and 1996, Paalanen won the Finnish diatonic accordion pelimanni championship four times, and he came second in the World Diatonic Accordion Championship in Austria in 1999. He has released four solo albums: Äärelä (2007), Breathbox (2010), Meluta (2014) and Rujo (2019). Meluta was nominated for the Nordic Council's Music Prize 2016 and for the national Teosto Prize in 2015. The Breathbox and Rujo albums were nominated for Ethno Album of the Year in 2011 and 2020 respectively at the annual Emma gala, which corresponds to the Spellemann Prize in Finland. Meluta was also the final component of Antti Paalanen's artistically oriented doctorate, Bursting bellows – Bisonoric accordion's bellows rhythmics in composition in 2015. In his doctorate he focused on writing new music for the bisonoric accordion from an instrumental perspective. Antti Paalanen received the Nordic Songwriters Organisation's NPU prize in 2022 and was named Composer of the Year in Finnish contemporary folk music 2019 by the Finnish Music Publishers' Association (MPA Finland).

In recent years, Antti has toured festivals all over the world - mainly around Europe, but also in the USA, Canada, Russia and Japan. Paalanen is active as a musician and composer in a number of contexts in Finland. He has contributed compositions and arrangements on 15 albums with various bands. He has also written music for the stage and been employed as a stage musician at the Finnish National Theater and other major Finnish theatres.

Cast:
Antti Paalanen – accordion