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Ari Lahdekorpi is an instrumentalist and composer based in North Western Ontario. His credits include composing the score for the award winning feature film, Letters from Karelia, writing songs for various country and gospel artists, and performing on hundreds of recording sessions as a backup musician or producer. Over the last 2 decades, Ari has released 10 independent recording projects and continues to have a remarkable track record of success with online downloads of his music. Ari began his musical career as guitarist for a traveling Pentecostal faith healer. He later moved on to become a session guitarist in Winnipeg, Manitoba during the late seventies and early eighties. Ari's fingerwork was heard on hundreds of sessions for Records, radio broadcasts, television, films and jingles. During that time Ari performed live with groups like, Brotherlove, Dega ( featuring multi-juno award winner Steve Bell ), Rhonda Hart, Byron O'Donnell, and Joey Gregorish. In the mid-eighties Ari relocated to Ontario. While continuing to perform live as a sideman, Ari began releasing solo guitar projects. Some of the notable artists that Ari has performed with include, Bobby Vinton, Frankie Laine, Pinetop Perkins, Roy Young, and Paul Shaffer of the Letterman Show among others. Performance highlights have been opening for Stevie Ray Vaughn, Hank Williams Jr., and the Allman Brothers, at the Beaver Dam Lake Festival in Western Manitoba, and as part of the opening act for Bob Dylan at the Fort William Gardens in Thunder Bay during Dylan's early nineties tour. In 1992 TVO produced a half hour program on Ari's performance at the noted Jazz club, "The Top of the Senator" in Toronto, Ontario. The program was broadcast nationally on the Vision Network and on TVO. Since 1998 Ari Lahdekorpi has been one of Canada's most successful internet musicians with downloads and plays numbering into the hundreds of thousands. In recent years Ari Lahdekorpi has been involved in compositional work for film and television, having provided music for some Finnish language films as well as the NFB. He has been incorporating several ethnic instruments into his work of late, including the Finnish folk instruments, the Kantele and the Jouhikko. The recent cd project entitled, "Letters From Karelia", is the soundtrack from the award winning National Film Board feature film of the same name. The cd is a stylistic departure from Ari's past work. The music is primarily acoustic, with a strong eastern european flavour. The project features Ari as composer, producer, musician, and arranger, performing on guitar, mandolin, bass, and synthesizer.