“Painfully concrete, hauntingly abstract, very personal but also universal, the strong feeling of a simultaneous certainty and uncertainty, the known and the unknown, the intuitive logic and the uncontrollable chaos - how do I feel being in the middle of the many paradoxes of performance? Where does the self, my body, my breathing, my senses, my intention, and my action lie in between these paradoxes, here and now, but reaching out to my unconscious past and the unpredictable future?”
Salla Hakkola aka Salmun Deer (M.M. 2006, Sibelius-Academy, music education) is a harpist, singer, composer, improvisor, and performance artist whose work crosses boundaries of both musical genre and artistic discipline more generally.
As a harpist she is known for her experimental approach to the instrument which challenges the conventional role of the harp, and for her boundless ability to indulge in multiple music genres and groups, improvisation, and interdisciplinary projects. As a composer she is best known for her mobile game music for the Angry Birds, Clash of Clans and Merge Mansion, through which her music has reached millions of listeners across the world.
Two years spent in Mexico between 2003-2006 introduced her to the three main starting points for her artistic career:
Composition, Paraguayan harp technique, and an experimental approach to life.
Her music is equally likely to be heard on the classical concert stage, at folk festivals, contemporary music festivals, in indie-rock clubs, mobile games, and experimental happenings. As a composer, she has worked with ensembles ranging from top symphony orchestras (Helsinki Philharmonic, Avanti!, Seattle Symphony Orchestra) and contemporary chamber groups to jazz and indie-pop combos. As an instrumentalist she has performed on acoustic and electric harp in equally varied contexts, with artists and groups such as Yona, Pekka Kuusisto, Apulanta, Jukka Perko and Verneri Pohjola.
The Harp
Hakkola’s unique playing draws from an intuitive mix of Paraguayan harp technique - which entails rhythmic muffling of the strings with the hands - and extended harp techniques and sounds from contemporary classical music. From 2010 onwards she developed this rhythmic playing style in her Master of Global Music (Glomas) studies at the Sibelius-Academy, performing with musicians and groups from various different music cultures and genres.
She made her own arrangements of Finnish and Latin American folksongs for folk harp and voice, which she performed in concerts in Finland and abroad actively between 2008-2011, both solo and in groups such as Chispas duo with percussionist Tuomo Huhdanpää, and Löytölapset, which she founded in 2011 with bassist Eero Seppä and drummer Touko Ruokolainen.
In recent years she has concentrated on her Lyon & Healy Silhouette electric harp, using a variety of effects pedals and loopers. She is currently working on making a new kind of music that combines her self-created technique of South-American origin with the possibilities of the electric harp.
Performance Art
Salla Hakkola began work in performance art professionally after participating in the IPA – Performance Art Workshop in Bukarest, Romania with mentor Jürgen Fritz. Hakkola’s performances focus primarily on two things: corporality, relationship between the body, space, and materials at hand and the natural processes of this interaction on one hand - and fusing sound with performance art, inspired by the conventions and customs of performing and music-making in different music genres, on the other. Hakkola often performs with her harps, both acoustic and electric.
Together with composer Tim Page she is a co-founder of Dayjob, a collective of musicians and performance artists seeking new ways of creating collective, multi-disciplinary performances.
Her duo Salmun Deer & Tim Page also performs as a subgroup of Dayjob.
Composing
Hakkola finished her first Masters of Music degree in music education at the Sibelius-Academy in 2006, with piano as a main instrument, harp as a second and voice as a third. Following this degree she continued developing her own style with the harp, studied contemporary music composition with Eero Hämeenniemi, and also studied Philosophy, Esthetics and Literature at the Helsinki University, while teaching music in different institutions. She has been active in the contemporary music scene in Helsinki, composing for various different ensembles, and was a board member of the contemporary music association Korvat Auki (Ears Open) from 2008-2011.
In 2008 she began to compose music for theatre, films, animations, tv-commercials and mobile games through the production company Kombo, of which she was a co-founder with her brother Ilmari Hakkola.
She continued her game music career at Rovio between 2011-2019 as the company's composer and music supervisor. Her soundtrack for the game The Fruit Nibblers won the award for the best game soundtrack in Game Audio Awards 2016. Audio team Hakkola & Hakkola continues making music together in their own company Tonally.