Thank you to everyone who came to visit my poetry-sound installation PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA (“small truths/facts”) at Taavettilan riihi in Jyväskylä this weekend. It was a delight to see so many visitors attending (despite the glorious summer weather outside), some even spending hours inside immersed in the experience.
The feedback I received from the audience was overtly positive, at times even rapturous which was all heart-warming (of course, people withhold any criticism they might have – I always wonder why is that?). People commended the way the voices, words and music kept emerging and unfolding in the space, creating an immersive, never-ending spatial and aural experience.
The adjective I kept hearing was that of ‘meditative’: this one author even called the installation as a kind of “meditative opera” (as in opera the narrative voice often forms the central musical element). From now on, I shall call my poetry installations as that: meditative operas.
Personally I’m very pleased with how the whole installation – poems, voices, music, their generative evolution and acoustic diffusion, architecture, environment, light etc. – turned out. Even though I’d already been listening to the piece for hours and hours while making it, I’d still find myself utterly immersed in it, captivated by how it kept producing novel combinations of its textual and sonic elements. Version 2.0 is already in the pipeline (upon request).
The space was lit by the natural light coming through the windows, and it only occurred to me during the exhibition that what an integral new layer that formed! As the piece kept unfolding within the space throughout the day, simultaneously the light kept softly changing, creating a generative experience of its own: at times it felt utterly magical.
Thank you to Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry and Villa Rana for making this possible. And thank you to Petri Turunen (from Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry) for initiating, curating and organising this project: your work was invaluable. And naturally, thank you to all the poets, whose words – spoken and written – kept inspiring me throughout the process (when my music continued failing): they made the piece the novelty and success it was.
My deepest gratitude.
Authors/poets Helmi Solimeïs, Riitta Cankoçak and Petri Turunen
This week my new poetry/sound installation PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA will premiere as part of the opening weekend of the Art Street Jyväskylä’s autumn season (Jyväskylän Taidekatu), September 6-8. The installation will take place at Taavettilan riihi – the oldest building in the Jyväskylä city area and located within the Jyväskylä University Botanical Garden.
In the piece PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA (“small truths/facts”), texts from nine Jyväskylä-based poets intersect, collide, become pollinated and stratified, break apart – and form new, accidental, momentary compositions. This is accompanied by discreet site-specific music created from the sounds recorded inside and outside the installation space (a “drying barn”). The voices and textual fragments of the poets as well as the musical motifs keep unfolding in a state of constant permutation, quietly self-organising and -changing – like a river that flows, an urban space in motion, or a forest following the seasons.
The featured poets:
Olli-Pekka Tennilä Suvi Valli Kristian Blomberg Riikka Simpura Petri Turunen Anniina Louhivuori Niklas Salmi Riitta Cankoçak Vesa Lahti
Welcome!
Working on the installation at the KulttuuriKauppila artist residency in Ii, Finland, July-August 2024.
Taavettilan riihi. This is the oldest building in Jyväskylä, Finland – and the site of my next sound installation!
I really love working on site-specific installations: engaging in local conditions and creating a novel kind of work that exists between architecture, environment and music – and in this case, also poetry!
While this won’t be my first site-specific piece to use spoken word*, it’ll be the first one to focus primarily on poetry, drawing from texts and voices of contemporary local poets. And I couldn’t be more thrilled: after all, this is a city known as the capital of Finnish hip hop and the Athens of Finland – not to mention for its vibrant literary scene – celebrated for its inventive command of the language.
Instead of drifting in distant server clouds as music releases do (Earth Variations, how’s the world receiving you?!?), the music in site-specific pieces becomes rooted in real habitats, acquiring new spatial and social possibilities as well as responsibilities; it becomes locally meaningful and not just globally meaningless.
And any feedback you receive for your work comes from real living beings, not from marketing spam bots (as you mostly do online).
The installation will be presented during the opening weekend for the autumn season of the city of Jyväskylä’s Taidekatu (Art Street), September 6-8. More info in due course.
* My very first site-specific sound installation, Nordic Staircases at the Round Chapel in London in 2001, was based on a recording of a poem of mine, read in different Nordic languages and electronically treated to correspond with the acoustics of the chapel’s large staircase.
I’m truly excited – and relieved – to finally have this album completely released and out in the world. It’s been years in the making, with unexpected detours and discoveries along the way.
I’m truly grateful to the brilliant artists and musicians who made this album possible: Viktoriia Vitrenko @viktoriiavitrenko on vocals and voice, Omar Harb @omarharbmusic on bass, Petteri Mäkiniemi @petterimakiniemi on Ginette, Nazim Bakour @nazimbakour on electric guitar, Em’kal Eyongakpa on field recordings. And to the brilliant Gregor Zemljic @gregor_zemljic_gz_mastering for mastering the album with such care.
Thank you also to the similarly brilliant Lee Clough @leeclough, whose original photograph (now obscured by my yellow haze) inspired both the visual and sonic direction of the album. And for her Indian riverscape tape recording that first set me off for unearthing these possible musical geographies (back in 2000!).
My gratitude and warmth also extend to everyone else whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet along this journey – there are simply too many of you to mention here 🙂 – as well as to the Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR) and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for their invaluable support. Thank you.
Keep rocking X ______ “Earth Variations explores the idea of music as an embodied and possible geography: a milieu, landscape, terrain, situation, condition, atmosphere. It is inspired by our unique, complex planet in a state of flux. Featuring contributions from soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko, bassist Omar Harb, Ginette player Petteri Mäkiniemi, guitarist Nazim Bakour, and sound artist Em’kal Eyongakpa, the music has been composed and recorded in London, Saarbrücken, Espoo, Douala and Paris between 2004 and 2023.”
This Bandcamp release includes high quality download and additional artwork. The album will be available on all the other streaming services in early June (the exact release date to be confirmed).
Earth Variations is inspired by our unique, complex planet in a state of flux – a world that our escapist political and economic ideologies, against all the actual intelligence and knowledge, continue to regard as a resource to be exploited and exhausted rather than an opportunity to be nurtured and shared. (Or perhaps it’s no longer about ideologies and escapism but pure greed and indifference.)
Drawing from the notion of geophilosophy – “earth-thinking” originally conceived by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to consider the relation between thought and environment (concepts created through the relationship between territory and earth) – the album explores the idea of music as an embodied and possible geography: a milieu, landscape, terrain, situation, condition, atmosphere. In this sense, it follows the map initially drawn by artists such as Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Bernard Parmegiani, Biosphere, Ben Frost and Björk (and many others, even those without the initial B) while adding its own, previously uncharted regions to it: musically it journeys in a less familiar territory between the habitats of contemporary classical, experimental electronic, world and possible musics – occasionally reaching a more elevated ground to gaze at these more familiar vistas on the horizon.
The album features contributions from soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko, bassist Omar Harb, Ginette player Petteri Mäkiniemi, guitarist Nazim Bakour, and sound artist Em’kal Eyongakpa. The music has been composed and recorded in various locations in London, Saarbrücken, Espoo, Douala and Paris between 2004 and 2023. The album has been mastered by Gregor Zemljic (Earresistible Mastering).
The cover art includes original photography by Lee Clough of the Wadi Rum desert, Jordan. Lee is the main culprit/catalyst in this story: it was her low quality cassette tape, which she’d recorded during a boat ride in the Ganges river near Varanasi in India and which she’d lent me back in London in early 2000, that first gave me the idea of music as a possible geography, landscape and place – or geography/landscape/place as a possible music. I became entranced by that tape and the world, possible and real, its sonic content and quality painted; I even failed my first year of Sonic Arts studies because I insisted on incorporating the tape into my compositions despite the clear instruction not to use any field recordings at that stage. I couldn’t resist: that early morning/late evening river atmosphere with people and cows passing, smoke from the riverbanks rising, gentle engines droning, birds and monkeys calling – everything punctuated by Lee’s joyful, sometimes perplexed, shrieks and comments – represented to me the very essence of life, of being alive in this world: no ideologies or escapism, simply being immersed in the landspace, embracing the world.
Fast-forward to 2015 and the European refugee crisis. Instigated by the geopolitical situation, Earth Variations started as an extensive sound art project about migration, conflicts and borders. However, since I was unable to secure funding for its realisation, the initial sketches gradually evolved into instrumental compositions of their own, still carrying those themes at their core but in more abstract forms.
Years later I would find myself overdubbing these compositions with bassist Omar Harb in a studio in the vibrantly multicoloured 10th arrondissement of Paris. Suddenly I felt struck: here I was with a guy who actually came from one of the origins of that crisis, who had experienced the war firsthand, personally witnessing the destruction and tragedy of everyone and everything close to him, eventually having to flee his home across terrains and territories toward a more possible future. Yet here he was in front of me, playing the most beautiful and life-affirming music that seemed to know no crises, conflicts, borders, ideologies, territories – let alone any art projects, curatorioral practices and their momentary trends. This was simply life: this was why music existed.
Later that summer of 2021, when we were recording vocals with Ukrainian soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko at the Cité des arts in Paris, the war in Ukraine was yet to happen. In fact, the idea of a new war in the world would have seemed like the most ridiculous prospect back then, since wars belonged to the juvenile and less enlightened world of the past – and we lived in a civilized world of now…
Pleased to announce that my new album Earth Variations will finally be out on May 15. The initial Bandcamp release, with additional artwork and higher quality download, will arrive on all the other streaming platforms in early June.
The release has been delayed by my doctoral programme application, which has taken most of my spring. Excited to announce that I’ve finally been accepted to the prestigious and advanced Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium! Phew (and gratitude). For the next four years, I’ll be researching the future of music and developing a novel environmental AI application while enjoying some waffles and chocolate.
The mastering of the album has also taken longer than usual, since this one required “gardening, not architecture” (after Brian Eno): putting your gloves on and tending carefully the delicate textures and colours the album is made of. Yet I knew that my inimitable mastering engineer, Gregor Zemljic (at Earresistible Mastering), would be able to rise to the challenge, preserving the fragile, unique qualities of the original while enhancing them greatly. And he did!
Phew and gratitude.
These also extend to the Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR) for their two-year artist grant, and to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for their six-month artist grant, both which enable me to focus on my current stage of artistic research and production with the depth, immersion, time and care they require. Thank you, SKR and Taike. The future suddenly feels possible in its improbable brightness.
Keep redesigning the world. Stubbornly.
Marseille, France, 2021. One of the many places visited on the album.
Five years ago today. Finishing the dress rehearsal for our Musica nova 2019 concert at the Helsinki Music Centre: Jaani Helander on cello, Heikki Nikula on bass clarinet, me on afrorithmics, and – hiding behind the camera – Petteri Mäkiniemi on Ginette.
The idea for my forthcoming album Earth Variations (out in March!) was born in those rehearsals and recording sessions, when we were developing our commissioned piece and experimenting with instrumentation and possible musical geographies. The album also features, among others, PetteriMäkiniemi on Ginette (an electronic instrument designed and built by him, based on the French ondes Martenot electronic instrument developed in 1928).
It’s been quite a journey since (via Paris!), and I feel I’m looking at this picture from a higher, different plane/plateau now. There’s always been a great joy and freedom in everything I do – at the expense of a faster and greater success, I suppose – but the more you do and search and find, the deeper and more genuine this joy and freedom seem to become. It’s all about enjoying and being attentive to the process more than aiming for some set goals. As David Bowie said:
“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
I certainly felt like swimming when performing alongside these genuinely talented musicians.
Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, Paris, 7 April 2021.
Coincidentally, I also set out on my music-making adventure in 1993; in 2021, I was recording overdubs for Earth Variations in a studio in this very neighbourhood as pictured (Studio Bleu, 10th arrondissement).
My instagram scribble at the time:
“Cycling around Paris makes one feel alive, as if going around the world. The city was an instant crush back in 1995, and continues to be a discovery, with a lot of random access memories and novel outlands from the fragments of time. A multitude that’s human after all. #dafunk“
Time flies, as do the ideas and potential creative directions enabled by the space and quiet of the writing residency. It’s been one of the most inspiring and productive periods ever, which will still continue for the coming spring until my next endeavours.
Early next year I’ll finally be able to start mastering the Earth Variations album, followed later by the Radiant City EP. They’ll be released in the spring and summer, respectively. Excited – and relieved!
Next year will also see the start of my major sonic art project that brings together science and art, thanks to the artist grant from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike). More about this in due course.
I’m also planning a collaboration with this Iranian santur master here in Jyväskylä in the spring. Having experienced a couple of his very moving live performances, we’ve been having inspiring conversations since, mixing music talk with those of world politics and philosophy: always a good sign. Instead of simply improvising (which I’d then have to painstakingly edit into coherent takes), he actually prefers to compose his parts beforehand – I’ve been hoping for this kind of dedication for most of my musical life! Ours will be a special EP, blending the sound of his 3000-year-old percussion-stringed instrument with my yet-to-be-finished Afromontane Sound Painter. Ancient meets futuristic.
I’m currently busy applying for a doctoral programme in this prestigious music academy in Europe. Out of over a hundred applicants, I’m pleased to say that I’m among the final four to be considered for this particular position. This is a huge honour in itself as the position would allow me to focus on an artistic research into the future of music as well as the role of composers/musicians in the future society. Fingers crossed.
My planned book (on the future society through sonic arts) has been trundling and instead diverging into a series of essays. In our monthly essay workshop here with local writers – all of them established and many with literary awards (contrast this with me) – I’ve been receiving the most unexpected feedback: so enthusiastic, constructive and critically supportive! These authors have enabled me to see my writing in a wider literary and cultural context and believe in the importance of what I’m trying to say as well as the literary style I’ve been developing. So: something new will be published in the future days.
Spotify sucks. Please, reconsider using the service if you care about music, the artists that create the music and a healthy economy that underpins any equal, productive and functioning society. Thank you. (in academic terms: SPOTIFY SUCKS. THEY ARE THIEVES AND CRIMINALS.)
Lately I’ve been making new music for various poetry readings here in Jyväskylä. This has been the most refreshing as the music is a reaction to the local culture and environment as well as the poetry in question, enabling one to approach the idea of music from often surprising perspectives. Waking up early in the wintry mornings when it’s still dark and quiet, working on a new composition while watching the light gradually dawn and reveal a landscape covered in snow and frost – an in-between state conspired by the poetry, the landscape and the emerging music where anything feels possible. It is a literal dawn of the world, a (winter) wonderland.
Have a warm and peaceful transition into the new year
Sähkö Club #42 at Vakiopaine, Jyväskylä, 9.9.2023. [a delayed repost from other social media]
What a wonderful evening! Thank you again to the audience, the performers, the Vakiopaine staff and of course the organisers, Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry, for inviting me.
It was a pure delight to perform to such a full house and receptive audience. After Japan, this was probably the most attentive and engaged audience I’ve had the pleasure to play for. Audiences everywhere have naturally tended to be attentive and receptive – bar the lovely but lively crowd in an El Raval gallery in Barcelona once – but there are times when the vibe from the crowd feels especially warm that it becomes part of your playing, elevating the performance differently.
And when your friends surprise you by travelling across the country to see you play, the evening feels truly special.
Thank you again to the brilliant poet Sanna Karlström for the beautiful performance together. I feel like we invented a new form of sonic art between poetry and music – at least it felt to me like wandering in another green sonic world. I’ll certainly be exploring this Terrestrial style (and its budding subgenres) more; Sanna and I will also continue performing (and possibly recording) together in the future.
Thank you also to Petteri Mäkiniemi for his fantastic, prerecorded Ginette performance that formed part of my solo live-set (I’ll post the backing track online soon).
After my solo set this woman came to tell me how my music had enabled her to travel to the time before the dinosaurs. I was flattered by this most unexpected comment – and slightly disappointed: I’d wanted to take the listeners toward the far future instead, to the time after the current dinosaurs (the fossil capitalists). But I guess any kind of time travel / possible world experience should be regarded as a success.
Warmth x
Photo: Miia LaitinenPhoto: Heta KaistoPhoto: Heta Kaisto
This Saturday I’ll be performing two live-sets at this legendary venue Vakiopaine and their similarly legendary poetry club SÄHKÖ in Jyväskylä. Come, if you find yourself in this Nordic City of Light!
This first club night of the autumn features poets Sanna Karlström, Hanna Syrjämäki and J.K. Ihalainen.
I’m excited and honored to perform together with Sanna Karlström. The multi-award-winning poet and author will be reading from her newest poetry collection Pehmeät kudokset (Otava 2022), for which I’ve created a completely new, site-specific composition that will be generated live (I refer to the musical style as “Terrestrial” – after Bruno Latour )
My solo set will include a similarly new composition, inspired by the urban condition of Jyväskylä. Expect afrorithmic cityscapes and futurhythmic environments: Terrestrial Afrorithm!
The entry is free. Welcome!
SEPTEMBER 2
Field recording. Creating sounds.
Discovering and amplifying sounds that are too fragile, ephemeral and indeterminate for the music-entertainment-industrial-complex.
There’s something a lot more gratifying in selecting and designing sounds in this way than sitting in front of a screen and clicking through thousands and thousands of the most dazzling, amazing, impressive ready-made sounds that the industry offers these days.
Music-making, here in the forest, becomes an adventure of discovery again, drawing/composing from life.
(The music will be returned to life next Saturday at Sähkö, this legendary poetry club with spoken word artists and experimental live music and sound art here in Jyväskylä … inadvertently, this new piece also became the basis for a major sonic art project that I’ll be embarking on next year! Never underestimate the potential of weak, transient and ambiguous elements, those unpromising beginnings…)
AUGUST 28
Autumn Leaves (2023).
“But I miss you most of all my darling When autumn leaves start to fall…”
It must be that time of the year again, since one has to dig out their dataflow landscape designs and do some gardening before the next live set. Pure Data is like cycling: once you have learned how to flow with it, you just never forget how freeing it is!
AUGUST 13
The joy of developing new music for a forthcoming live-set, together with various spoken word artists (more info soon).
Knowing that the music will only exist in that brief moment of time and draw from a local culture and environment is hugely thrilling for me. I currently refer to the music as “city-sensitive afrorithmic soundscapes and futurhythmic environments”. I may need to clarify that a bit.
The image is based on a photo that I took ten years ago at a rural market on the border between Benin and Togo (last night the DJ at this party played an irresistible Afrobeat groove which turned out to be a track by Frankosun and the Family – one of my collaborators from Benin! I felt so happy for them).
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composer / sound artist / writer 