Although Lau Nau is relatively unknown in North America, one look at the website belonging to the woman otherwise known as Laura Naukkarinen proves that she’s been busy at home. Playing with noisy rock bands, improvising with like-minded experimentalists, writing beautifully fragile songs, and crafting soundtracks for award-winning films occupy her time. Her creative practice is so diverse that it seems only natural to ask just which Lau Nau we’ll get when she makes a rare Vancouver appearance next week.

“I’m playing my songs on the guitar, with some toys and small sound objects,” Naukkarinen answers in lightly accented English, by way of a glitchy Skype connection from her home on a Finnish island somewhere west of Helsinki.

“They’re really quiet songs,” she stresses. “It’s not like a big rock-club thing; it’s more like sitting down, listening. If it was religious, it would be like a vespers, you know. But it’s not!”

What kind of subjects will she sing about in this small, secular ceremony?

“That’s a hard one, because I’ve done a few records already and they all had their own theme,” she says. “The latest album of songs, Valohiukkanen, came out in 2012, and the lyrics were about different characters, and maybe also things that happen in the dark side of our lives—melancholia and so on. But it’s really about persons who cannot live inside society. The texts are really not that straightforward, but that was the theme of that album.

“I try to say a lot of things with a few words,” she adds. “So in that way, the songs are quite… I don’t know. Intuitive? Dreamy? Something like that.”

Naukkarinen’s penchant for crafting atmospheric music has also served her well as a soundtrack composer, with HEM. Någonstans a good example of that. Lotta Petronella’s film is set on the outer islands of the archipelago that Naukkarinen calls home, and her score is perhaps the best example of how Lau Nau’s environment has shaped her recent compositions. The music is built up from layers of small sounds, with Pekko Käppi’s fiddlelike jouhikko contributing a strong human element as well as a direct connection to their country’s rural past.

“That was made for a film about three men and their daily life. One is a fisher, a hunter, and another is a postman—he has to deliver the mail over the ice or by boat,” Naukkarinen explains. “Nature is a huge factor in their daily life, and you can hear it in the music, I guess, too. The sea, nature, the roughness of the weather, and the surroundings.”

Whether depicting a landscape that can kill or the workings of her own mind, Naukkarinen’s music almost always exhibits a relaxed sense of time that is perhaps the most profound link to her island life.

“There’s no hectic city life around me. The cycle is more slow, even though life with small kids can be busy,” she says. “I’m quite a slow worker when I’m doing Lau Nau stuff, so it suits me well that I can live at a slower pace here in the countryside. When I’m working with bands or improvising, things can happen really fast, but when I’m working alone I require a lot of time. I have to think about things!”

With contemplative moments at a premium here in busy Vancouver, Lau Nau’s upcoming show offers a welcome chance to slow down and dream.

Lau Nau plays the Lido next Thursday (May 26).