Heikki was Jari Haapalainen and Maria Eriksson who started to play together in 1999, in Stockholm, Sweden. That was the year they met, and the music was a way of spending time together. They started to record a couple of songs which resulted in their debut, the mini-cd, HEIKKI. All the recordings were made at their home using an 8-track recorder and the instruments that happened to be around. In other words, a true bedroom release.
It’s hard for us to categorise their music and we don’t like to do that. But people often ask…
They were definitely influenced by all kinds of music as: Mary Gauthier, Barbro Hörberg, Mary J Blige, Bert Jansch, Dirty Three, Miles Davis, Brian Eno, The Triffids, John and Beverly Martin, The Roches, Jim O’Rourke, Kate Bush, Townes Van Zandt, Sandy Denny and hundreds more…
In the end they only released one more album, their second and last ”Heikki II”. From that album, this quite successful song (from that time) is taken, a song that did extremely well on Swedish National Radio: