You reach the summit just as the northern sun is disappearing over the horizon. The day’s last golden rays light up the landscape lying between the mountains – green fields flecked with snow, farms and villages spread out along the river. What’s that sound you can hear – a lonely violin, or just the wind playing tricks on your ear?

If this place sounds like a fairytale, that’s because it only exists in a dream. Gaupdalen, or Lynx Valley, is an imaginary realm where Johanna-Adele Jüssi mentally teleports whenever she is performing and composing. It’s a visionary place. A utopian jigsaw puzzle pieced together from many of the northern European regions she has travelled. Meaning it sounds familiar and yet... never quite like anything you’ve heard before.

Coming from Estonia, Jüssi has spent much of her life journeying around the Nordic countries as well as Germany and the Shetland Islands. For the past nine years she has lived in Norway. The music she makes with her trio (Bendik Lund Haanshus, guitars/guitar synth and Christo Stangness, double bass) bubbles with the tunefulness and freshness of folk styles across northern Europe. You’ll recognize many elements which you can almost place. But not quite. And then you ask yourself: what is it that I’m trying to place, anyway?

Jüssi has picked up and studied the rich and varied folk traditions of all the places she has visited, which have shaped her as an artist. But what does tradition mean when you are just passing through? For a nomadic soul who has exchanged one homeland for another, the insistence on traditional styles and techniques can appear limiting, the music stands still. Traditions come alive when they are injected with influences from outside. In Lynx Valley, this can happen all the time.

‘Immediately, I fell in love with the place and felt a strong sense of belonging’, she says. ‘I had suddenly found the place where I wanted to live, where my musical wanderings could rest and develop further. When I woke up, I couldn't remember what the valley looked like or where it was, but I remained completely infatuated with it.’

Now her trio is releasing a new collection of nimble, open-hearted compositions. Out of the musics that formed her – you might detect Norwegian and Estonian folk, jazz and electronics – she has forged a strong individual voice. Most of all, you can hear the positive and joyful spell that the magical Lynx Valley has cast over her music. Meanwhile she has extended the concept on tour by handing out copies of a local newspaper and seed packets so that audiences can grow their own carrots from the mythical region. It may be a fiction, but the warmth and honesty of Johanna-Adele Jüssi’s music tells you that Lynx Valley is a place where anyone can feel at home.