World / Interspaces

‘World’, featuring soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko on additional vocals, from the album Interspaces. The main vocal is by Taina Grohmann, quite heavily timestretched here, and it’s an outtake from my debut album Shimmer & Bloom (2011). The video consists of photographs taken by me in Tokyo, Marrakesh, Fes, Cotonou, Agouegan and Helsinki.

What makes this track really special to me is that it became, unintentionally, a condensation of my most cherished musical awakenings: from Can to Fela Kuti, Bernard Parmegiani to Steve Reich, Brian Eno to Björk, Jon Hassell to Pan Sonic, etc. to etc., it seems to have distilled ingredients from all these influences into its own kind of worldly essence. Especially four pivotal discoveries come to mind: ‘Boat-Woman-Song’ by Holger Czukay and Rolf Dammers (from their 1969 album Canaxis), ‘Come Out’ by Steve Reich (1966; it was preceded by a similar tape piece It’s Gonna Rain but Come Out was my first encounter with Reich), ‘Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics’ by Jon Hassell / Brian Eno (1980), and ‘Kokoku’ by Laurie Anderson (from her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak).

It’s also fascinating to notice that we indeed seem to be occupied by the same few ideas throughout our lives, exploring and cultivating them as we go along: when visiting Finland this summer and listening through my old tape archive (what’s left of it anyway: I have foolishly discarded most of my early demo cassettes), I was amused to realise that several of the tracks I’d made 30 years ago bore a distant similarity to pieces like World. While obviously exuding more naivety and my attempt to follow the musical trends of the time (like Balearic and ambient house), their shortcomings hinted at a desire to break free and create stylistically something more diverse and global; I was a teenager dreaming of a better world as well as exploring more of this world. And a couple of those pieces actually got played on the Finnish national radio (Radiomafia) where the presenters described them as “very interesting and original” at the time: the memory of having such an experimental mainstream radio culture now feels like a dream from a fictitious world, with any differing colour and sparkle (and any sign of a more complex and potential world) having been quashed decades ago by the monotonous industry playlists of hyper-consumerism.

But despite late capitalism’s best efforts, life continues to flourish and diversify – like in the basement rehearsal space of the Cité international artist residency, where I was fortunate to encounter the Ukrainian soprano, conductor and artistic director Viktoriia Vitrenko. When we were later recording her vocals and I sat there listening to her experiment (“the voice transports you: our small studio space turns into a concert hall, then into an Afromontane forest between a desert and an ocean, before returning, via the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Jonquet district of Cotonou, to a wooden cabin by a lake, with the stars just appearing in the late summer sky and the moonlight traversing the water’s still surface”), I felt a new musical awakening, a possible music waiting to be unearthed beyond the albums of mine we were working on – except this time, instead of records and radio waves I was in the same room where the music was coming into being. To experience such an unguarded moment of openness and play, when things break free and your preconceived ideas fail and become receptive to the environment – a molar world becoming molecular, a difference in the atmosphere becoming sensible yet still indeterminable – is what philosopher Gilles Deleuze might have described as being “present at the dawn of the world”.

Petals

‘Petals’ from the new album Interspaces, featuring Petteri Mäkiniemi on Ginette. A proper music video/short film for the track is currently being developed with this internationally acclaimed media artist, and it will be released sometime next Spring (due to time and budget constraints). I wanted to try some visual experiment for the piece now, however, while the album is still fresh…

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Petals has been 24 years in the making. The ambient background was created during a summer night in 1998 in Suonenjoki, Finland: I had my studio and rehearsal space in this wooden cabin by a pond, surrounded by forests and fields on an organic farm where I spent that summer working, and while I was recording, I could see through my window nocturnal mist hovering above the still surface of the water, interrupted only by two swans gliding quietly together. The landscape was illuminated by a full moon and the reflection of a midnight sun. A couple of years later in London a friend of mine wanted to use the track as background music for his painting exhibition, and for the purposes of the show I added a voice of this Finnish girl reading a poem of mine (in Finnish), timestretched 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 I finally realised how to continue with the music. Petals was finally finished during a summer night in 2021 at my Cité des arts studio in Paris: going through a heartbreak caused by this artist (coincidentally from Finland), I felt the piece was still missing something until I stumbled upon a lone Ginette recording Petteri had made and sent me the year before; Ginette’s expressive power and harmonic progression matched both the existing composition and, with some added raw distortion, my emotive state perfectly, as if recorded specifically for this piece, and brought the composition and my broken heart finally to a close. There were no swans gliding on a moonlit pond outside my window that night but a soft hum of the Parisian traffic, a couple of nocturnal birds singing, and a sense of a new dawn.

Algerian desert music

Recording with this Algerian guitarist, Nazim Bakour, for the upcoming album Earth Variations. We are deep in the Algerian Desert, an evening is setting in over the endless variations of sand dunes and rock forests and an oasis town down below teeming with people, animals, vegetations and agricultural soft robots. From my vantage point high on our dune I can see the rooftops of Paris through a giant window that has mysteriously appeared floating against the burning sunset sky.

The previous day Nazim had invited me to a jam session at his Cité des arts studio in Paris. There were musicians from Algeria, Benin, Brazil, China, Finland, France, Ghana, Germany and some others (whom I didn’t manage to meet properly). While sitting in the middle of the room and listening to this intercultural, borderless new music serendipitously emerging – what the late trumpeter Jon Hassell might have dubbed Fourth world music, “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques” – I began to hear a beautiful yet subtle male voice singing quietly during the calmer passages in the music. The voice was exactly what I’d had in mind for Earth Variations for some years now, and naturally I presumed it was just me imagining and projecting this voice onto the music once again. But then it grew louder, took on new variations – until I eventually realised it was this tall and handsome Ghanaian man, sitting serenely lotus-like, eyes closed and his mouth barely moving, who was producing the voice. I felt elated: in that global space in the middle of the room, I had not only found the missing guitarist but also the missing singer for my album.

Earth Variations will be out later this Autumn or early next year (depending on the forthcoming recordings).

Absent River

A video painting/music visualizer for Absent River, a track from the new album Interspaces:

Absent River was originally a spoken word piece for the Radio Continental Drift compilation A Radio-Bridge across the Zambezi (2018), consisting of remixes by artists and radio-makers from around the world in response to audio/radio pieces by local BaTonga women from both sides of the Zambezi river. My piece featured a story and voice by Lucia Munenge about the challenges for women to provide fresh water in Binga, a resettlement area in Zimbabwe for the BaTonga people and a result of the World Bank financed Kariba dam and lake which destroyed the original Zambezi Valley ecosystems and livelihoods.

A Radio-Bridge across the Zambezi on Bandcamp

Two years later I was approached by this rather interesting Finnish artist originally from Zambia, who was looking for a new kind of musical direction for her upcoming nationwide project about environmental and social issues: she had been inspired by my previous album Flash of the Spirit and especially the track Terra, and asked if I could send her a couple of more pieces in the similar spirit. Her brief was of “futuristic and uplifting electronic music with an African dimension”. Exalted and thrilled, I made her a total of 42 sketches and half-finished pieces in almost one sitting in two days, of which this version of Absent River was one. And while Lucia Munenge’s story had to go, her voice remains in the ambient texture of the track.

Unfortunately the project of this artist never came to fruition, for reasons I never learned (some venues like the National Museum of Finland had already been confirmed). She went on to release new music with this more commercial dance music producer (a suggestion from her record company perhaps? “We want more of the same”) while I relocated to Paris, my 42 sketches becoming the foundation from which the albums Sharawadji, Interspaces and Earth Variations emerged.

I hesitated retaining the original title, considering the serious reality told in the first version and the seemingly jubilant flow in the new one. But then I recalled some of the liner notes from the compilation: “After 60 years of struggle, the Valley Tonga people have a story to tell about cultural survival, creative resilience and determination for self-help and self-organisation.” The track itself is a continuation, an evolution, a ‘futurality’: the possibility that things could be different.

Interspaces is out now

My new album Interspaces is now available for streaming on all major music platforms.

The album is also available on Bandcamp where the release includes higher quality audio download and extended album artwork. In the end I decided to make two initially planned bonus tracks part of the official album since – thanks to the brilliant mastering once again by Gregor Zemljic – their inclusion felt natural, necessary and uplifting.

“Interspaces – my tenth album (including two collaborations) – presents 11 tracks of largely electronic instrumentals with abstracted vocals, drawing from electronic, popular, contemporary and global musics. The initial idea has been to explore a new kind of beauty and sensitivity, spatiality and intricacy in music. The album features contributions from soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko @viktoriiavitrenko, bassist Omar Harb @omarharbmusic, and musician and Ginette player Petteri Mäkiniemi @petterimakiniemi.

Influenced by diverse ecosystems and worlds between vast empty landscapes and pulsating global metropolises, the music is furthermore inspired by the idea of globality and mundialization as well as the city of Paris where the album was produced between 2020 and 2022.”

With every release you try to reimagine the future world. And the feedback I’ve received so far regarding the new album has confirmed that music and sound, even those made by me, indeed have the capability to bring us to the world as it exists without being reduced, represented, distorted and clouded by ideologies – economic, political and religious constructs – and to show the potentiality and possibilities that the life, physical and nonphysical, continue to suggest. A complex, ambiguous, evolving, creative, more invigorating and freer state of existence: “a dawn of the world” as philosopher Deleuze described it. Or as Björk said, “this universe is truly a magnificent spectacle, and needs to be mirrored”. That’s why we have art, music and science.

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I would like to thank you for all your support and feedback so far, it’s been the most inspiring and catalyzing to receive and hear. I feel I’m at the beginning of a new musical discovery and adventure, and I hope many of you will continue to share this future journey with me as well.

Naturally I would also like to extend my heartfelt gratitude once again to Viktoriia, Omar and Petteri for their invaluable contribution to the album, and to Gregor Zemljic for his genius-like/zen-level mastering of the music. I’m delighted that this same group of collaborators and talent will be featuring on my next album Earth Variations as well.

With warmth and care,

Ilpo

Serene noise

Listening to the final version of the Interspaces album (before mastering) in the heat and bustle of Paris, after having finished everything in the tranquility and bloom of Finland. It strikes me that the record exists exactly between these two worlds and landscapes: there’s a refreshing heat, bustling tranquility, serene noise, horizontal and vertical variations; a certain timelessness of something with a long history; celebration, contemplation and complexity of all things life. (yet I wish I could take a dip in that still, fresh lake while enjoying the heat and sounds of the city) Can’t wait to share this record with the world X

On new albums, music industry and post-music

My new album Interspaces is now finished. Hooray! However, I decided to postpone its mastering and release until after my forthcoming “holiday” (always somehow working) in Finland: I want to listen to it against the stillness and freshness of rural Midsummer nights, with my senses quietened and reoriented from the hustle and bustle of Paris, and make any final adjustments if needed; I’ll be also finishing my other album Earth Variations while there, in the same pastoral immersion.

I’ll be working in the very same room, with the same view over fields and forests, where I made my first serious electronic compositions 28 years ago (one of those pieces almost made it onto Interspaces!). Until recently, I’d thought this would be a fitting place to finish these two albums as, for quite a while, I’d been feeling that Interspaces and Earth Variations would be my final works and then I’d quit music, move on to greener pastures like writing – and what a more poignant place to bring my adventures in music and sound to close than the one where the journey started.

Music is a strangely intoxicating and invigorating substance, however, and once you’ve discovered something through it, it’s difficult if not downright impossible to quit. Ideas, inspiration and curiosity keep flourishing, even if your work continues to be ignored by music industry and media year after year, release after release; once you’ve realised that music and music industry are actually two very different and separate things – the former is about creating possible worlds and reimagining the society; the latter is about obsessing over profits and social media hype – none of that industry fuss matters anymore and you’re able to work with greater abandon and scope. In fact, you might be onto something as critic and music historian Ted Gioia illuminates in his recent and poignant, yet solacing essay Is Old Music Killing New Music?: the real progress in music happens now outside the music industry – record companies, media, playlist algorithms etc. – because the latter is no longer interested in innovation, in discovering new sounds and nurturing new talent. “New music always arises in the least expected place.” Personally I have no problem with any of this (I listen to old music more than new stuff, yet I couldn’t make old-sounding music myself because composing for me is a way of researching and understanding the evolving world) – although it’d be great to have some kind of structural support for this emergent new sonic art happening in the margins – and perhaps we could say that music, especially Pop Music, existed happily until its demise around 2010, and now we have something new for which we haven’t found a better name and suitable function yet.

So, on my small plot of land, I recently began to get a sense of what kind of music I want to develop next (it’ll focus on words and voices, listening and performativity, new yet subtle globalities), putting my retirement from music on hold. Meanwhile, Interspaces will be out sometime in June/July while Earth Variations will be released in August/September. Have a great end of the week!

A breeze from a possible world

Paris, a few random pictures from recent walks (my Instagram account is currently “disabled for violating our terms”. What is it about colourful abstract visuals and pictures of Parisian streetscapes – all created and taken by me – that is so violating? Beats me).

Lots of walking, pondering, working on music and writing. What can one do, aside from feeling sad and angry? There’s an utterly pointless and unnecessary war and humanitarian crisis raging on the continent, innocent people and other living entities are suffering, the war criminals of the Kremlin are committing crimes against humanity yet still allowed to remain and vote as members of the UN Security Council and sit at the international negotiating tables (WTF!?). The Hitler/Putin and his other delusional warmongering cronies belong in jail, nowhere and nothing else. Period. Why is it that the dead – tyrants, historical figures, ideologies, beliefs, yesterday’s repressive practices and policies etc. – hold so much power over the living? The Kremlin currently and so obviously embodies and exudes the dead whereas Russia and Ukraine and most of the international community belong to and continue actualising the living.

Finished four new pieces for the forthcoming albums, using the vocals of the Ukrainian soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko that we’d recorded last year. Her voice is so beautiful, transcending, pure. The vocals bring new vitality and scope to my compositions, a breeze from a possible world, deeper freedom. The music may not change anything in this world, but still, we have to continue exploring and nurturing the potential of the living while we are here, for this world alive is way greater and more brilliant than any empire, conquest or ideology of the dead ever was or will be.

Warmth and care, dear world.

In memory of Adja

RIP Adjanohun Loetamini.

I’m saddened and shocked to hear about the passing of Adja, one of the most incredible human beings and musicians that I’ve known. Adja was a musician and artist in the town of Grand-Popo, Benin, where he was revered and much loved locally and regionally (eg. in Burkina Faso where I once traveled with him), not to mention by the constant stream of Finnish artists who came in contact with him during their stay at Villa Karo, the Finnish-African culture center in Grand-Popo. That’s where I also met Adja, and during my three-month stay we recorded, performed, partied, laughed, danced, philosophised and traveled together – across Benin, Togo and Burkina Faso – and became very good friends.

What confounds me is the realisation that once such a gentle soul and a vigorous force of life walked on this Earth – and now he is no more. (I remember watching him walk barefoot across the Burkina Faso-Togo border, red dust from the red soil rising under his feet, looking so carefree and content with his customary black instrument case in one hand where he always kept his flute; afterwards I asked him why he didn’t have to queue to have his passport and other documents checked like the rest of us. He said that as a musician he was free to travel everywhere since musicians were revered in that part of Africa. Not sure how true or universal this was, but I observed him living it. Then he told me about the significance of the red soil uniting people across the borders, making the nations and divisions built on that soil seem more like that ephemeral dust hovering in the air.)

Under the stars in hot Ouagadougou nights we debated about the cosmos and meanings of life while the dusty speakers at our neighbourhood bar kept blasting the most amazing West African funk, disco, afrobeat, dancehall and gospel – raw, distorted, full of soul – and beer and pastis flowed; we chatted up women at the FESPACO film festival, trying our different approaches just for fun (Adja’s down-to-earth exuberance proved more popular); when this singer failed to turn up for my rare live gig in Cotonou, leaving me performing my electronic backing tracks alone on stage, Adja, who was to perform with his band CLAN right after me, immediately joined me with his brother and together they improvised vocal, guitar and percussion parts to my tracks they’d never heard before, bringing that human liveliness back to the music (or as Adja would tell me: in Africa they never improvise, they just play); and whenever during our travels I might feel down, confused or stressed by the challenges inevitably brought forward by the cultural differences, it was Adja who was consoling and cheering me up – and who wouldn’t be reinvigorated by those deep compassionate eyes, patiently listening ears, infectious smile and (literally) elevating bear hugs of his!

At the Fespaco 2013 film festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Adja had his own shortcomings and challenges like the rest of us, naturally, but what always struck me was the humility and balance he kept exuding regardless or because of those; he always seemed to be the most content and happiest wherever he was, whatever he was doing.

And I never remember seeing him without a musical instrument of some kind in hand: he seemed to be able to play any instrument he got his hands on and to find his voice in any given (musical) situation. Never a virtuoso though – at least not in the archaic Western sense and in the same way that, say, Lee “Scratch” Perry was never a virtuoso singer or Moe Tucker was never a virtuoso drummer – he instead embodied music as a living philosophy, rooted in and emanating from the very environment and life he was inhabiting; his playing radiated from a much longer now and greater here, free of current trends and institutionalised aesthetics. It was cosmic music: pure, sincere, raw, open to the outside world, diffusing the distinctions between art and life, music and nature, inside and outside. When we recorded his guitar for the song ‘Adja’ from my album Sahara, it was me who had to retune/detune my synthesizers to accommodate the living (and lived) character his guitar had aquired. Even though most of our recordings didn’t make it to that album, I never forget the commitment and enthusiasm with which he proceeded to record those various instruments of his over my tracks. He was simply a pure joy to work with.

I never learned how old Adja actually was, but based on the wisdom he’d gained, I think he was close to 200; judged by his vigour, he was probably around 18. My bet, however, is that he was simply a timeless person, a childlike sage, a maestro, leaving his footprints on that red soil before continuing his walk from one realm to another. ‘Säkenöivä voima’ indeed (the direct English translation “sparkling force” doesn’t quite capture the depth and grace of this Finnish expression). Walk and rest in peace, you beautiful soul.

At the closing ceremony of the Fespaco 2013 film festival.

Sharawadji out now

The latest album of mine, Sharawadji, will be available on all the major music streaming services on Fri 11 February. The album is currently available on Bandcamp where the release includes additional artwork and high quality download.

Here are a few photos of some of the locations where the album was recorded (I have lost most of my photos to broken harddrives over the years). Had a little nostalgia trip while going through these, and it reinforced my view that a piece of music is indeed a lot more than the end product: it’s the whole process and journey that goes into making it (that’s why AI can never replace music made by humans: it can of course make music based on its own processes and journeys, but never replicate the human experience…).