Currently enjoying my writing residency in Jyväskylä, Finland, enormously. This city of lakes and hills is known as the capital of Finnish hip hop; the Athens of Finland (“the cradle of the arts and sciences”, nowadays a major educational and cultural centre); the capital of the eminent Finnish architect Alvar Aalto; the City of Light (a global pioneer in innovative urban lighting). In the fall I’ll start performing city-sensitive ambient live sets in this local and legendary poetry club. The words are also sprouting: after writing solely in English for so many years, I suddenly discovered a whole new, rich and fertile, “exotic” landscape in the Finnish language.
I’ll be releasing a special EP of melodic beat-based electronica soon, with an album to follow later. It continues the thread of my debut album Shimmer & Bloom – including a previously unreleased track with poet Rick Holland – but with an added perspective and experience of 12 years. The tracks just continue to sound timeless (and beautiful!) year after year so I might as well make them timely now.
While visiting my childhood home over the Midsummer break, I brought my entire DAT (digital audio tape) archive with me, covering the years 1995-2008. It’s incredible how much novel, brilliant and releasable material there is when it’s no longer your younger, too critical and often insecure ears listening to it. Expect compilations like Proposals for Possible Musics: From Every Imaginable Genre to Every Other Imaginable and Unimaginable Genre + bonus Alternative Realities Mixes coming out soon.
Also, forgotten field recordings of Tokyo, London, Paris and a Finnish summer cottage: from African drumming in Yoyogi park and rainy evenings in a bustling/calm Shinjuku to a salmon being smoked over a lakefront fire and a wood stove sauna being prepared (via London drain pipes and a Parisian café where French, Japanese and English keep forming a new lingual blend).
(The classic ‘Black Egg’ is also here – whoa! – which used to cause serious headbanging when we played it live to an overcrowded audience at the sweaty basement of the now legendary but defunct Foundry bar in Hoxton, London, in 2001. Ours was the first band ever to play live in those old bank vaults, with a long queue extending up the stairs and through the bar above as the space could accommodate only so many. A definite highlight of my musical adventures!)
Next year I’ll start developing a new version of my Future Forest Space composition and sound installation – thanks to Taiteen edistämiskeskus (Arts Promotion Centre Finland) for their artist grant that enables me to continue this long-term project of mine. I’m truly grateful! The work addresses the use of AI and environment in music and sound art while developing a new kind of musical language through a more considerate application of these. The project will be realised in Switzerland, France and Finland together with various research institutions.
The album Radiant City is coming along slowly but well. I love exploring the idea of a city through the abstract energy and pulse of music while sonically revisiting the cities of my past travels. The album threatens to escape the city limits though and diversify into all kinds of directions and environments.
Earth Variations is now finished and waiting for a funding for its mastering. I wish the music industry was more like art world: valuing originality, ideas and content over popularity and familiarity.
Outside the narrow corridors of the industry, life and music continue to expand, diversify and flourish. And that’s all that matters in the long run. Have a beautiful summer! x
I had promised myself not to take nor post any photos during my writing residency – simply because the Finnish environment is way too familiar to me – but after three years in Paris I find myself wondering everything anew here. Trees become the benign aliens from the film Arrival, architecture has all the simplicity and functionality of the Arrakeen city (from Dune), and people…people are simply down to Earth. Or from some another green world.
I love the fact that when you walk five minutes in one direction, you are in the centre of a lively small town with people from all walks of life enjoying the spring sunshine; when you walk five minutes in another direction, you find yourself in the middle of a forest, with only the sound of birds, breeze in the branches and a gentle hum of trucks on a distant highway as your company.
And everything here works. Having just today met and talked to some others who have lived abroad, apparently we Finns have a reputation of being a bit “grumpy” – grumbling, critical, negative – when we are in foreign countries, and for a simple and decent reason: in terms of functionality, what is already bleedin’ obvious in Finland is still bleedin’ unobvious (read unnecessarily complicated) everywhere else. 😉 I obviously agree with the statement – I sign it, that’s me – but also with the necessity of having both worlds: the bleedin’ obvious and the bleedin’ unnecessarily complicated.
After the densely built and occupied environment of Paris, the emptiness and openness of this Finnish town invites one to imagine and build new spaces. Trees have just begun to bud and the environment to become green and fragrant. Tonight we had a jam session with local and global musicians (with me playing piano after a long time – I’d wanted to be the guy operating all the electronics but what can you do) at this book launch to accompany this writer, who read from his newly published poetry book about the moon, trains and metaphysics. We are all on our way to somewhere, somehow, all the time.
MAY 27
Exotic. “From another part of the world; foreign.” “Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange.” “Having a strange or bizarre allure, beauty, or quality.” ”Not native; introduced from abroad; foreign.” “Strikingly unusual or strange in effect, appearance, or nature.”
One night in Paris I had a discussion with a dear friend of mine about the word ‘exotic’. While I wanted to revive the word and rescue it from its unfortunate colonial(istic) connotations, my friend felt the word had outlived its time and purpose.
And she was right, of course. But I just don’t know how else to describe in one word the “unusual, different, striking, strange, extraordinary, bizarre, fascinating, curious, mysterious, colourful, glamorous, peculiar, unfamiliar, outlandish” quality and feeling that I keep experiencing here.
It’s nothing dramatic, naturally, everything here remains more or less familiar if not mundane. But there’s a certain ‘exotic’ quality to many things when you observe and encounter them after a while. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze called this “the dawn of the world”, an atmospheric condition of the everyday presenting novel possibilities.
It’s the city festival of the arts – a Nuit Blanche or the Night of the Arts but for three days – and last night I went to see a gig at this legendary countercultural bar where I last set my foot in 25 years ago. Listening to this Ginsbergian slam poetry against Pan Sonic/Velvet Underground/Afrika Bambaataa -esque live music (afterwards I proposed a collaboration – they were so good), together with such a warm and down to earth crowd and the early summer/late evening sun setting behind large windows, I couldn’t help but feel that this Northern small town/cosmopolitan city experience appeared, for lack of a better word, rather exotic.
JUNE 4
A long walk in a light rain, following a lake after a lake after a lake. Exactly how many lakes are there in Finland? As if this was some kind of land of a thousand lakes!
JUNE 12
The Rainforest.
In the middle of this town there’s a nature conservation area, a wild forest with unique flora flourishing in a river valley the size of only three hectares. When you descend the steep stairs into the valley (or cove) at either end of the reserve, you could be forgiven for thinking that you have accidentally taken a wrong turn and arrived in the Amazon rainforest instead – except that there are no signs of illegal mining and logging operations going on here, not even legal ones.
The lush and dense vegetation; the vivid tapestry of bird songs; the invigorating air and scents; the murky and muddy waters of the river; the old wooden bridges shaped and broken by weather, erosion and time; and the near absence of any man-made sound, dampened on one side by the vegetation and deep slopes and on the other by water cascading through rapids…all conspire to create an impression that you are indeed deep in a jungle, alone in the wilderness, free and brave – despite the built environment always being just a few hundred metres away. Perhaps there are caimans in the water, too?
The reserve is much loved by the locals and visitors alike, yet it never gets crowded and you are left to roam this small plot of Eden on your own. Occasionally you might encounter an ornithologist or an ecologist, and they will excitedly tell you what constitutes the plant you are admiring or why a bird is singing in such an intricate or monotonous pattern. You emerge from the forest a lot calmer and more educated.
Next year I will be realising a forest-themed composition and sound installation, and for that this sanctuary has become an invaluable resource, “another green world” of study, contemplation and inspiration. As a curator friend of mine recently said, there’s no more perfect an installation than that of nature…
JUNE 22
Since arriving, I have discovered four rather surprising cities within this town (actually a city but the ‘town’ emphasises its cosy character).
This is:
1) The capital of Finnish hip hop. Even the actual capital city and other bigger cities here look (up) to this town for its sound, wordplay and collaborative spirit. My first reaction was “where are the banlieues? The inner cities and the housing estates?”. But Finnish hip hop doesn’t need urban decay to rap about – a tranquil forest will do!
2) The Athens of Finland. This is “the cradle of the arts and sciences” in the country (the very Finnish words for ‘art’ and ‘science’ were invented here – a great place for inventing new words!); nowadays the epithet also alludes to the town’s role as a major educational and cultural centre. With this local author – who is about to leave for a writing residency in the original Athens – we thought of yet another resemblance: both cities are defined by a hill in the middle!
3) The capital of Alvar Aalto. The eminent Finnish architect spent his formative years, from his early school years to starting his family and career, here. This city of lakes and hills has the largest number of significant building complexes designed by Aalto in the whole world. Alvar Aalto is always in the house!
4) The City of Light – although for slightly different reasons than Paris: the town is a global pioneer in urban lighting, actively investing in energy efficiency, safety and aesthetics in its designs that are unique (site-sensitive) to each area, enhancing their architecture and built environment while minimising light pollution. I’m yet to see their “Light Vision”/“ValoVisio” plan properly in action though, as it’s summer and the sun barely sets. Who knows, with all this Bronx-Athens-Aalto-Paris lineage going on and with all these culture makers active in the city, Jyväskylä could very well become also a city of new enlightenment one day…
‘Dancers’ from the album Interspaces (2022). This visualizer is made entirely of footage filmed in the Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, October 2020.
This will be the last video painting/visual contemplation for the Interspaces album – unless some visual artist wants to make a proper video artwork to accompany the music. I will now quieten for my writing residency in Finland for the next six months, focusing on my upcoming book on the future society through sonic arts while also finalising the album Earth Variations, to be released in the autumn (depending on the funding).
‘Dancers’ was originally made for the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in 2010, to be used in the background for the reading of Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s book The Tightrope Walker. In the reading, five voice actors read passages from the book in five different languages: the minimalist ambient/background drone on the track itself is made entirely from the voice of one of these actors – a Ghanaian man reading in Twi – modeled acoustically through a sustained note of a string instrument. The rest of the music was completed at the Cité des arts residency in Paris in 2021, with everything recorded in one improvised take after another during one particularly tender yet elated late night studio session. All subsequent attempts to “improve” these initial takes simply failed to capture the fullness of life in that moment in time, so eventually I left everything as it had first come into being: earnest, imperfect and pristine.
One strong influence on the music – apart from O Superman by Laurie Anderson – was the painting Dance (La Danse) by Henri Matisse, made in 1910. While recording, I suddenly started picturing the painting and the rhythm and movement of its figures and colours. In fact, all my music has been rather strongly influenced by the painting style in question: Fauvism!
‘Bright Blue’ from the album Interspaces (2022). The track features Omar Harb on melodic bass. The original light reflection footage in this visualizer is by Petteri Mäkiniemi, provided courtesy of the artist.
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Bright Blue continues to be the most downloaded and streamed track from the album. If I actually had the resources, the music video for this would consists of a dancer performing a minimalistic yet inventively elaborate and graceful contemporary dance choreography. The scenography – lighting, set and costume design – as well as the cinematography would reflect this in a similar fashion, exuding some kind of timeless futurity.
The title itself is a take on Pale Blue Dot, a phrase coined by astronomer and author Carl Sagan reflecting on the final photograph of planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe before it exited the Solar System and headed toward interstellar space. While we indeed live on a tiny pale blue dot – contrary to the delusions of grandeur of some nationalist leaders and fervent tribalist ideologues – Earth is also a bright blue marble gliding in the vastness of space, shimmering with life and its vast, shared and diverse potential (although if the late capitalists and their fervent ideologues get their own delusions satisfied, Earth could very well turn into a carbon black hole – or pit?). In terms of planets, ‘bright blue’ is often used to describe Neptune, which I must have flown by at some point when working on the music. In any case, this was simply a working title, and since giving titles is the hardest part of the creative process, you are often stuck with the file name you hastily improvised when saving the initial sketch.
We recorded Omar’s bass at Studio Bleu in the vibrantly multicoloured 10th arrondissement of Paris. Afterwards, while Omar had to leave for his next rehearsal, I sat down for a glass of wine at my favourite café next door, where the colour of my usual corner table is baby blue. The blues caused by my recent heartbreak had begun to fade and the future was starting to appear bright again: like that azure morning sky in a turquoise Mediterranean bay later that summer…
‘Glisten’ from the album Interspaces (2022). The original footage in this visual contemplation is from the Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, filmed in October 2020.
Glisten shares the same journey as the album’s opening track Petals, emerging in that same summer night on the organic farm in Suonenjoki, Finland, 25 years ago. While noodling on my synthesizer in this wooden cabin by a pond – my studio and rehearsal space, surrounded by forests and fields – I was contemplating the nocturnal mist hovering above the still surface of the water outside my window, interrupted only occasionally by two swans gliding quietly together. The world was serene and limpid, illuminated by a full moon and the afterglow of a midnight sun. Suddenly, a scintillating melodic pattern began to emerge, as if petals of a flower that had begun to unfold and reveal the bloom inside; this was followed by another, a more “starry sky glistening above a Northern wilderness” kind of pattern. A couple of years later in London, a friend of mine asked if he could use both tracks as background music for his painting exhibition, and for the purposes of the show I added the voice of this Finnish girl reading a poem of mine (in Finnish), this time harmonised and vocoded into a more abstract and ethereal layer.
For the next 20 years the piece remained unchanged – and unreleased, despite my efforts to find a suitable context and form for it – until one Spring morning in Paris when I finally figured out how to continue with the music (“there’s nothing worse than a brilliant beginning” – Picasso). The initial updated version became closer to industrial electro though, with syncopated beats and bassist Omar Harb delivering a motorik funky bassline beating even the machine in precision, duration and slight liveliness (I intend to release this version in future); for the album I opted for a more spacious and emptier take, making the original ambient track the central element, reducing the beats to a minimum, and replacing the synths and basslines with the abstracted voice of Lucia Munenge from the Absent River piece. As with Petals, there were no swans gliding on a moonlit pond outside my window upon the track’s completion but a soft hum of the Parisian night traffic, a couple of faintly glistening stars in the piece of sky above, and a sense of a fresh new dawn.
Happy New Year! Let’s hope it’ll be peaceful and prosperous for us all, bringing many new joys and adventures along the way.
This year will see, among others, the release of my album Earth Variations – finally! (it’s hard to let go as I keep enjoying inhabiting its sensuous possible world, from improbable musics to possible musics, exploring its dynamic and immersive territories between music, environment, geography, soundscape and abstract art). The release has been delayed until March-April though: I’ve been unable to work on it properly during the holidays (a lack of quiet space), I cannot afford to finance its mastering at the moment (after ten albums, my personal well has run dry) – but also because of one beautiful, serendipitous discovery over the holidays.
I had asked a dear friend of mine to provide a spoken word part in her native Urdu (beautiful language!) for the remaining unfinished piece, and when we finally sat down at this luminous Belle Époque/1920s’ café to discuss the piece, she asked if I preferred the poem she’d chosen to be spoken or sung. I was confused: “can you sing?” I’d known this loveliest human being for two years, and it was only now that she told me she’s also a trained singer in Indian and Pakistani classical music! (I’d been looking for such a singer for a while now, but without funding it’s difficult to find the collaborators you need). To me, she’d always been just one of the most brilliant anthropologists, architects and visual artists out there – yet here she was, beginning to sing these romantic classical Pakistani songs softly into my ear in the most enchanting voice over our candlelit coffee table. If there’s a celestial version of us all, it’s certainly through singing. Above us, the old Parisian street lamps, a crescent Moon and five planets of the solar system shone brightly; at one end of the street, the grand Opéra house appeared majestic and dreamy in its evening lighting, at the other, the Louvre Museum continued to glow gently. This was probably Midnight in Paris, and I was accompanying Paul Gauguin, Claude Debussy and others in their quest for faraway places: yet it was just Saadia and me at a crowded Belle Époque/1920s’ café, envisioning our future performances and recordings in Paris together. The faraway had been explored (and exploited, unfortunately), now it was all about the complex, multicultural hybrid future ahead of us to discover and cultivate – and it is bright as far as culture is concerned.
We’ll be recording vocals on few more tracks to see how her voice might work on this album. There’s a sense of a journey toward home, a circle closing: the biggest musical influence on the album has been the late American trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, who in turn studied Indian classical singing with Pandit Pran Nath, transforming that singing technique into his trumpet playing and thus discovering his unique sound, combined with electronics and novel rhythms…
Have a great start of the year X
PS. A couple of official photos of the performances at the 2022 Prince Claus Impact Awards Ceremony in Amsterdam last month (received them recently). Photography: Frank van Beek.
DEFMAA MAADEFDEFMAA MAADEF (Mamy Victory and Defa)DEFMAA MAADEFSunday Obiajulu Ozegbe and Ennovate Dance HouseSunday Obiajulu Ozegbe and Ennovate Dance HouseSunday Obiajulu Ozegbe and Ennovate Dance HouseSunday Obiajulu Ozegbe and Ennovate Dance HouseAmarafleurAmarafleurAll photos: Frank van Beek
As we quieten for the holidays, here’s an outtake from the upcoming album Earth Variations.
‘Undiscovered Planet’ was originally a site-specific composition made for Vapaan Taiteen Tila in Helsinki (Free Arts Space, a cavernous bomb shelter under the Katri Vala park, now used as an event space for the students in the University of The Arts) where it formed part of my sound and light installation A Garden, Faraway (for Katri Vala)* for the Sounding: Underground sound art exhibition in November 2017. In the installation, the music was diffused through large ventilation pipes into two cavernous, warmly and colourfully lit corridors, but because of its subtle and discreet character and the relative loudness of the other works on show, the piece went largely undiscovered by most visitors; I had composed and mixed the music in situ in late evenings after everyone had gone home, sitting alone in those beautiful, calming and quiet caverns and observing how the music emanated gently from the pipes and interacted with the space in ever-shifting, delicate ways. It had felt perfect, and those evenings became the most elevating and immersive sound-space experience in my career to date. It’s a shame then that no one else got to experience the installation in its intended, original condition.
This new version includes – quietly in the background – a conversation between Emeka Ogboh and me, recorded in Emeka’s kitchen in Lagos in March 2013 and with an orchestra of crickets, generators and neighbours pulsating in the warm night outside. It’s one of those Lagos-Helsinki things…
Have a peaceful and immersive holiday, everyone!
* Katri Vala (1901–1944) was a progressive Finnish poet, critic, school teacher, and during the 1920s a central member of the literary group Tulenkantajat (the Fire Bearers). Their main slogan “windows open to Europe” resonated strongly with me and my friends growing up as kids in a small village in Finland, while Vala’s debut book Kaukainen puutarha (A Distant Garden) inspired me greatly as an adolescent to seek life beyond that offered by our cultural, economic and political realities at the time.
Greetings from Amsterdam! I’ve been back in my old hometown for the 2022 Prince Claus Awards for arts, culture and social progress, as I had the honour of being one of the advisors for the awards jury this year again.
It’s such a privilege to be able to encounter so much talent, creativity and passion from all over the world within such limited time and space. The awards ceremony with its surrounding networking events is one of those cultural incubators where new possible geographies and becomings are being formed: “the dawn of the world” (after Deleuze) created by people coming together, and through listening, curiosity and care, attempting to find a common ground, a novel space, between each other as well as between existing borders, territories and divisions. There’s a sense of new hopeful futurality in the air. Yet it’s not all plain-sailing toward some utopia, more like a chaotic and colourful navigation through the present.
The awards ceremony itself at the Royal Palace was gorgeous, with King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima as well as Princess Beatrix, Princess Laurentien and Prince Constantijn in the audience. Also witnessed a heartwarming vocal performance by South African singer Amarafleur (chills running down my spine), futuristically primitive/indigenously futuristic hip-hop by Senegalese duo DEFMAA MAADEF (Mamy Victory and Defa), and one of the most exhilarating dance performances ever by Nigerian dancer and choreographer Sunday Obiajulu Ozegbe and his dance group Ennovate Dance House: their insanely inventive and energising choreography, inspired by the city of Lagos, was accompanied by a soundtrack fusing Lagos soundscapes with electronic music, and I literally had to hold back my tears and idiotic smile as it took me back to Emeka Ogboh and my wide-eyed experiments (LOS-HEL: Possible Cities) all those years ago. Inspiring conversations and encounters at the reception, dinner and the afterparty afterwards (met also this lovely opera singer from Fiji, into Finnish classical music and married to the French ambassador to Italy – turns out we are neighbours in Paris! I told him that as a kid I wrote a fictional adventure story based entirely on my imagined idea of Fiji; he’s yet to ruin that image). A tender, colourful, wonderful evening.
“Untranslatable.” French-Senegalese film director and screenwriter Alain Gomis, one of the recipients of this year’s Prince Claus Impact Awards, kept referring to the untranslatable qualities as those that make you ‘you’, and the reason why we need diversity of voices, narratives and perspectives to make that untranslatable somewhat understandable. When Gomis received the main prize for best film at the 23rd pan-African film festival (Fespaco) in Burkina Faso in 2013, I was in the audience listening to him but he spoke in French, with an overdubbed and shortened English translation echoing around the Stade du 4 Août stadium, and many things became untranslatable in that hot Ouagadougou night. I love the idea very much.
“A banker is originally a catalyst who enables ideas to come into being, and who ensures that wealth is distributed equally among the society.” Carlo Rizzo, the director of the Dubai Collection and an ex-banker, sitting next to me at the dinner table. He left his job as a banker, because he couldn’t help the society the way he’d imagined – imagine a world where the banks still served their original purpose?
Absent City (2008). Video by Megumi Matsubara / Assistant.
This moment now used to be an unimaginable future. Absent City, a mixed media installation by Megumi Matsubara, with the music/soundscape by me, in Tokyo in 2008.
I’m currently reworking this sound piece for the upcoming release Radiant City, which has now progressed from a short EP into a full-length album as well as an immersive sound installation (I should’ve known). The original Absent City piece is 90 minutes long of which the video here features the opening four, and for the new album it’ll be reduced to a 30-minute composition with four movements and additional instrumentation.
Time is indeed an interesting character (see eg. the films of Christopher Nolan). I hadn’t listened to the full 90-minute soundscape for over a decade because I’d regarded it as a failure, an embarrassing attempt at creating something between music and environment, music and city, music and sound art. The piece consists of seven lunch conversations, 90 minutes each, recorded in various public spaces around Tokyo between the artist herself and different people she’d invite each day. My job was to imagine these recordings as different instruments in an orchestra and turn them into an abstract composition, simultaneously resembling music and an urban soundscape. And since I only had one full day to do this, I had to work really fast: deciding, treating, “composing”, arranging and mixing the tracks almost in real-time. My lovely Spanish flatmates would pop in occasionally to listen and offer comments – and bring food from the dinner table! A quick getaway to a Finnish sauna and a cold beer – and back to my studio (with a couple of more beers) to finish and send the piece by midnight, when the dawn was breaking in Tokyo for the exhibition’s opening day.
The artist was really pleased with the result and said it was exactly what she’d been looking for. But I felt a sense of unease: I hadn’t had time to really sit back and evaluate what I’d done, let alone make any corrections if necessary. There were parts where I’d wanted to bring in more musicality, to explore the possibilities of “the studio as a compositional tool” more (see eg. the lecture of Brian Eno from 1979) but couldn’t. The soundtrack was already playing in Tokyo, while the summer in Helsinki blossomed elsewhere. My disappointment at what felt like a missed opportunity for something unique and proper made me soon forget all about the piece and move on.
Until a few weeks ago, when I came across it on my old hard drive and decided to give it a full listen. And boy what a trip through space and time that was, through a city that had become nonexistent – or been missing for too long! Here I was in some future city, a possible city, an invisible city, a multiplicity, a radiant city, experiencing an increasingly familiar yet heartening pattern: as time passes your criticality toward your work simply dissipates, gets forgotten, transforms into innocence and ageless fresh joy with lived experience. With the original condition absent, you’re free to experience the work and the world anew, those midnight hours of Helsinki turning into a dawn chorus in Tokyo. Sometimes the original condition is of course better and you’re right to leave it as it is, but here I found myself arriving in a future the seeds of which I’d planted all those years ago, without knowing how they might grow. What once had felt absent, was now starting to feel radiant.
My next album Earth Variations will be out early next year 2023. As often happens, the album would be ready for release in late November/early December, but due to the holidays it wouldn’t be delivered to the streaming platforms until January-February at the earliest. So once again, I’ll take the opportunity of the quiet during the wintry rural days to go through the album one more time, ears refreshed.
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I’m currently working also on a new EP titled Radiant City, an offshoot of the new album Interspaces. It will feature the piece Radiant City from the album as well as four new compositions: Trade I, Trade II, Monday Morning in Lagos and Midnight in Fez.
As the title suggests, the EP is inspired by an idea of the city: a dynamic, hybrid, inclusive and thriving multiplicity – not the Corbusier’s vision of a linear and ordered metropolis of the future but one of an indeterminate and colourful incubator of our present (and near future).
The pieces, which incorporate city sounds into the music, have been partially created by using generative music algorithms, where an algorithmic system (designed by me) has improvised the music or soundscape from the sonic material and instructions I’ve provided, thus producing results which I as the composer might not have envisioned or chosen. The process and its outcomes are a bit like the life in a city: indeterminately unfolding yet always retaining a recognisable character.
The EP will be out next Spring.
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I’m also considering releasing a new version of my album Pulses / Radiance from 2017. I came across it recently after a long time, heard the tracks in a wrong order, and was surprised how sensuous, fresh and invigorating it sounded. It’s a shame that works like this, by a multitude of artists, have to disappear into the ocean of indifference (online music publishing) so quickly; “digital amnesia”, as architect Rem Koolhaas described our online culture…And where the art world tends to embrace and elevate visual diversity, the music world tends to eschew similar sonic diversity (for the obvious physiological, cultural and economic reasons). Nevertheless, the album probably suffered from a slightly naïve production at the time as it was a whole new direction for me, and now with experience – better mixing, editing, soundscaping and mastering – its idea might come through clearer and stronger: it might even float in that ocean for few seconds before sinking. 😊 The record was a precursor to both Earth Variations and Radiant City, so in that sense this revisit would be exciting and timely as well. Let’s see (I’m already hearing musicians from jazz, classical and intercultural ensembles playing on the revised version…dreams).
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Finally, I’m also preparing a collection of my previously unreleased ambient and piano pieces from 1998-2022.
Tentatively titled A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, the album includes 10 compositions which have always represented the most welcome quiet waters to me when the stream of music has become exhausting, yet they have never managed to find a suitable home on any of my previous releases. And while I have often contemplated releasing purely an ambient album, the timing, the feelings, the drugs*, the ideas have tended to be wrong.
Until now, when my feelings are becoming toward less is more: less music that sounds like more music; less sound, more space; less perfection, more beauty; less engine noise, more bird song; less industry standard professionalism, more life-affirming authenticity; less centre stages, more environments; and so forth.
The album, which features contributions from composers-pianists Midori Hirano and Sylvie Walder, will arrive early next Spring.
Warmth x
*coffee, tea and wine in my case (thought of clarifying this 🙂 )
composer / sound artist / writer 