Liisa Matveinen & Tellu Turkka | Mikko H. Haapoja – Etno-Espa

Presenting the power of the runo song from along a decades long path with Liisa Matveinen and Tellu Turkka, and Mikko H. Haapoja’s electroacoustic bowed lyre landscapes.

16.00 | Liisa Matveinen & Tellu Turkka: ‘Words will not be forgotten!’ – 30th anniversary tour 2026

Master folk singer Liisa Matveinen and composer Tellu Turkka are celebrating their long journey together. It is time to highlight the best parts of their 30-year journey, the most touching stories, the funniest incidents on tours and the most powerful poems.

During these decades, Liisa and Tellu have researched and composed a huge number of old poems by, among others, Mateli Kuivalatar and Iro Sissotar and many other female runo-singers, whose verbal heritage does not age. And even after all these years Liisa and Tellu’s voices still merge together harmoniously.

The duo not only composes but arranges old runo songs as well. As instruments on stage, they play kantele, the Swedish Moraharp and the Udu drum.

To celebrate their thirty-year career together, the duo organises a jubilee tour in 2026. Two singers from the Suden aika quartet, Katariina Airas and Karoliina Kantelinen, join them in the project. The tour is produced by Minsku Tammela.

Liisa Matveinen – vocals, kantele
Tellu Turkka – vocals, mora harp, udu
Katariina Airas – vocals, mora harp, flutes
Karoliina Kantelinen – vocals, kantele

17.15 | Mikko H. Haapoja: Unheard Landscapes

Mikko H. Haapoja, releasing his second solo album at the Etno-Espa 2026 festival, makes new and distinctive electroacoustic music lead by the bass bowed lyre (‘jouhikko’). On Haapoja’s upcoming album, multilayered textures of bowed lyres, human voice and nyckelharpa are combined with soundscapes from different corners of the globe. Haapoja’s solo music is set in a dense forest that grows in a multi-world metropolis – in the pieces’ sounds, mountain birch forests, the sources of the Amazon and the Tokyo subway can overlap, creating yet unheard worlds.

Haapoja’s solo debut album Unheard Landscapes reached number 16 on the WMCE global music chart in September 2023. In April 2025, Haapoja performed at the Osaka World Expo on his second solo tour of Japan, taking the Finnish bowed lyre to the World Expo stages for the first time in history.

Mikko H. Haapoja – jouhikko, bass jouhikko, key harp, cello, programming, soundscape