Greetings from Amsterdam! My old hometown, where I haven’t been to for 22 years. I’m in town for the 2019 Prince Claus Awards for culture and development, as I had the honour of being one of the advisors for the jury this year. You can read more about the awards and the laureates here: https://princeclausfund.org/awards-laureates
As this decade is coming to an end, I became reflective on this rather transformative 10-year period I experienced – and put together a short Spotify playlist containing three pieces from each of the seven albums I made this decade. New Geographies 2010-2019
For this has truly been a decade of coming into being, journeying, discovering and developing new geographies, becoming: from escaping the noise of Berlin to the solitude of Helsinki in 2010, in order to focus on my debut album (which I’d been only dreaming of making in the previous decade while experimenting with wildly different sounds and lifestyles in London); through my subsequent travels and residencies in West and North Africa, Western and Southern Europe; through my further academic studies; through my public sound installations in Belgium, Germany, Finland, Italy and the US; through my subsequent six albums, which all explored the question of “what if…” (“what if this kind of cultural landscape existed”, “what if this was the most popular form of music, what kind of society would that suggest?” and so on); to this gathering of creative talents and minds in A’dam, where new possible geographies and becomings are being formed for the coming decade.
I’d like to extend my deepest gratitude to all of you who have supported me during these 10 years, and all of you who have been listening. It really has meant the world to me. The next decade will start off with a brand new album and new journeys and discoveries after that. WARMTH X
ps. few random and blurry pictures from the last night.
An update on my forthcoming album, followed by a longer
reflection on the present and the future.
Since I’ve been busy writing and finishing my thesis lately,
it seems I have to postpone the release of my new “electro/Tokyo-meets-Dakar-meets-Arctic-meets-Sahel”
album until early next year. The album would be ready for release in early
December, but I always feel that the end of the year isn’t the most ideal time
to put out new music, especially the kind that has more spring/summer vibe to
it; and soon the release will be a thing of the last year and decade (at least
in the eyes of the media), even though the music won’t become mainstream until
perhaps 2040. 😉 And since some of the tracks were already started
nearly 20 years ago but still manage to sound new, I think the record will
sound fresh next year also. Or, I might be put out the (higher quality)
Bandcamp version before Christmas, but the Spotify et al. release will have to
wait till next year due to the delivery times.
This might be my last album (at least for a while) in terms
of “traditional” electronic music with beats, basslines, chords, melodies, song
structures…I feel I’ve been there and done that – unless some great
collaborative project e.g. with some truly interesting singer emerges, which
would bring a whole new purpose and dimension to producing music. But as far as
my solo work with instrumental electronic “pop” goes, I’m done (and I couldn’t
be happier to be exiting with this new album, because I think it’s the best
I’ve done). Instead, I want to start going deeper into and continue exploring further
the new musical landscapes and possibilities like those suggested by my another
album-in-progress, Earth Variations, which moves somewhere between (the ever-blurring
categories of) world music, possible music, contemporary composition and sonic
art. It’ll be more experimental and, unfortunately, even less popular than my
current output, despite (or perhaps because of) it retaining the human and
emotive warmth, soul, at its core. Some of that exploration will probably find
its natural platform also in Aihio, my duo with Petteri Mäkiniemi.
Besides the natural curiosity, another catalyst for this
wanting to go musically and sonically somewhere new and exciting has been the
process of writing my thesis, which explores generative music, site-specific
sound and interdisciplinary art through the philosophy of becoming: to my
surprise, the last six months of writing it became the most exhilarating mental
journey I’ve ever taken! Especially the reading and pondering of the philosophy
(Deleuze), and having the opportunity to apply it creatively to the ideas about
music and sound, took me to places that I probably would have never reached
otherwise; it also reconnected me with my passion for writing (I’ve been trying
to get back to it for decades but music has always won – until now). After
finishing the process, music-making suddenly seemed…ordinary, routine, creatively
and conceptually rather one-dimensional.
The composer John Cage said that making music is a form of
philosophy, a way to think about, understand and be in this world. I have
always felt that way too. For example, songs like Prince’s When Doves Cry, Donna
Summer’s State of Independence, David Bowie’s Heroes, Talking Heads’ Born Under
Punches, Velvet Underground’s Run Run Run, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill,
Fela Kuti’s Alu Jon Jonki Jon, Björk’s Jóga, Brian Eno’s By This River, and so
on, are not just great pieces of pop music/art, they are (to me) entire
cosmologies, studies of the fundamental aspects of existence – not in any
lyrical but more dynamic, spatial and sonic sense, in the relations and spaces
between the sounds they contain. And I’ve approached my own music-making
similarly, it has always been more concerned with the world than the capitalist
demand for fresh product.
And this has led to my growing discontent with having to
operate within the music industry in general. Whereas my favourite field,
architecture, considers the whole world – politics, economy, society and culture
– and operates simultaneously as a creative, intellectual, practical and
academic practice, the field of music is mostly concerned with hype, ego,
instagrammability, showmanship, the amount of social media “likes” and Spotify listeners
– all so very unimportant, uninteresting and ephemeral things, in my view. There’s
no room or need for discussions, ideas, thinking. Perhaps in the 1970s and 80s
it was more common that an artist’s album release was accompanied by a broader
cultural and philosophical discussion among the press and audiences about the
work’s function and ideas (or maybe I’ve read too many interviews of Brian Eno
from that time), but now it seems like music is treated as a mere supplementary
and forgettable decoration, a by-product of a larger entertainment
manufacturing, an indifferent stream of background data which you skim for few
seconds before skipping to the next stream. The dichotomy between the (inner) world
that surrounds and goes into the making of a piece of music and the (outer) world
that receives it is often enormous – it’s almost like someone solved the theory
of everything which would then be used to advertise a can of baked beans at the
local supermarket only.
Well, I don’t actually blame audiences for wanting to use
music as an escapist entertainment only, in the current world of global
problems and political balderdash – and there’s simply too much music out there
for any of it to receive proper attention – although I’ve always maintained
that instead of escape, music actually takes us even more towards and within
the reality, closer to the dynamic nature of existence and its inexhaustible
potential (that philosophical function of music again). Perhaps music and art
are moments of reality amid our ideological aberrations of political power
games and free market religiosity?
Having had my senses arisen by the philosophical adventure and yet made even more unquiet by the dichotomy between my interests and the overall function of music, I’ll continue exploring this new musical (’possible musical’?) direction with great curiosity. I’ve always found myself occupying the spaces between things – be they research fields, art forms, cultures, continents, accepted musical genres – and it’s time I fully embrace this liminal condition and start cultivating its seemingly less crowded and less saturated terrain.
Thank you for reading, I really appreciate that!
Warmth X
Cover image: “Between architecture, music and environment – composing Future Forest Space in Neerpelt, Belgium, 2017”. Photo by Rachel Mrosek
My collaborative album with musician, composer and instrument maker Petteri Mäkiniemi has been finally released.
The album is called ‘Outlands’ and it’s released under the name Aihio, our new musical duo. Aihio is a Finnish word meaning musical motif, sketch, a work in progress – or in my mind now “a space where new ideas can emerge and develop”.
The album consists of 11 instrumental pieces that weave elements and influences from minimalism, experimental electronic music and West African musical styles into an impressionistic and atmospheric sound of their own. The composers and artists whose work has inspired the music include Arvo Pärt, Cluster, Fela Kuti, Jon Hassell and Pan Sonic, to name a few.
The music features Petteri on Ginette (an electronic musical instrument designed and built by him and based on the French electronic instrument ondes Martenot, developed in 1928) and me on Afrorithmics (afrobeat + algorithmic composition). The pieces have been improvised and recorded live in the studio with no overdubs; they have emerged during two rehearsal sessions when we were developing material for the Musica nova 2019 festival’s Tribute to Pan Sonic concert, to which we were invited to present new work with musicians from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra at the Helsinki Music Centre, February 2019.
I can only describe the album as a journey through varied terrains while immersed in the landscape, wondering the universe above; or orbiting the Earth and seeing the patterns of geologies and civilizations unfold without borders (no experience of that however); or travelling across galaxies and soaking up some stardust (some previous experience of that); or just watching a deer wander across a nocturnal meadow engulfed by mist and a golden midnight sun.
The French music blog The Black Box has been the first to note the release, calling the album “a musical curiosity”. The review is in French, but here’s the main segment translated by Google:
“A strange mechanical rhythm seems to support the album, like the hum of an engine, or the timing of a machine tool. Yet behind it is well long organic synth tracks that shape the rest of the pieces. This duality is present throughout the album almost, forcing the listener to take his trouble in patience, to listen carefully to the music to detect all that is hidden there, namely a universe. So simple album? Movie soundtrack? Video game? It’s a bit all at once, and more.”
I rather like that description “to listen carefully to the music to detect all that is hidden there, namely a universe”, because that’s what I felt when mixing the pieces in the studio: it felt often as if I was looking at this world from a higher orbit, or gazing up at the stars, or being immersed in rich and varied terrains, outlands. It’s quite rare to have this kind of impressions when working in a more technical and objective mode, but that’s what Petteri’s playing always did to me. It’s also a great compliment when you don’t know exactly how the music was made, what constitutes the elements, which instruments have been used. It takes the music slightly back to that condition of appearing “as strange and mysterious to you as the first music you ever heard” (from Brian Eno).
“Outlands is a highly original album, in sound as well as in its background concept. Even in the ‘experimental’ electronic genre, many sounds and processes are alike. Aihio manages to step outside the box and create their own unique sound. Literally!”
He wonders about the inclusion of Fela Kuti in our list of inspirations though. It was actually Brian Eno who said that the closest form of popular musics to ambient and generative music was Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat: they all evolve from a loose set of rules and ingredients, proceed organically through the layers of interlocking rhythms and elements, balance discipline and freedom, and create immersive environments – music as places. Naturally we didn’t try to imitate Fela’s Afrobeat but to use some of the textures, sounds and aesthetics, and transform them into new kinds of rhythmic terrains and, well, outlands.
The Bandcamp release includes higher quality audio and additional album artwork. The album will be available on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and all the other digital music platforms from Aug 2 onwards.
I hope you’ll enjoy this journey and landscape as much as Petteri and I have. It’s been an adventure.
Spring makes noise – and certainly so in the studio! A short update on what’s kept me busy and inspired recently.
I’m currently working on three different albums which will be released this year. The process of finishing them is slower than usual since I’m also researching and writing my Master’s thesis at the same time: it’s a philosophical adventure about generative music, complexity and “new future environments” but let’s not go into that now…
The first, still untitled album is my collaboration with Petteri Mäkiniemi which will be out in June. It combines Petteri’s self-designed and -built instrument Ginette with my “afrorithmic” system, and the result is rather beautiful and human, new kind of electronic music, mostly thanks to Petteri’s playing and the sound of Ginette (I’m just trying to hide in the background as much as possible). Musically it’s inspired by artists like Arvo Pärt, Cluster, Fela Kuti and Pan Sonic, to name a few.
The second one is my follow-up to Flash of the Spirit (2018) which will be out in July. It builds on the discoveries I’d made on that album as well as on Shimmer & Bloom (2011) and Arrival City (2013). 10 melodic and rhythmic ‘electronic contemplations’ of (the complexity of) the world. Somewhere between Seun Kuti’s Afrobeat, Aphex Twin’s electro, Kraftwerk’s pop, Erik Satie’s piano compositions and Grace Jones’ funk…so hard to define. (it’s basically me failing to make pop music that sounds like ‘pop music’ and ending up somewhere different 😉)
The third one is my experimental “World” album, currently titled Earth Variations. It started originally as a more extensive sound art project about migration, conflicts and borders, but since I wasn’t able to secure funding for its realisation, the initial sketches gradually evolved into instrumental compositions of their own. It still carries those themes at its core but in more abstract forms. The music builds on the ideas touched on Pulses / Radiance (2017), and is inspired by Jon Hassell’s Fourth World, Ben Frost’s industrial music and Steve Reich’s ensemble pieces among others. It’ll be released in October.
Ah I love you DJ Meredith from NYC ❤️ She’s played my whole album Flash of the Spirit in the last 12 episodes of her Afrobeat Show on the BTR Radio! I’m amazed at how she’s managed to find suitable spots even for the most delicate pieces like Dreamer and Hopeful Stars (well usually towards the end of the set to bring her vivacious global journey to a calmer end). I’m taken by the length at which she’s introduced the album in most episodes, it’s been hugely flattering to be featured alongside such icons of mine like Fela Kuti, Femi Kuti, Rokia Traoré and Tony Allen.
It’s always interesting to hear your pieces on the radio or playlists surrounded by a lot of different music, because then you realize how different your music often sounds. I was never aware of this until some friends mentioned years ago that I had my own sound and that I should explore it. For a while I considered it a failure, then the words of Samuel Beckett appeared: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” For me, the idea of making music has always been to “produce things that are as strange and mysterious to you as the first music you ever heard”, to quote Brian Eno. Music holds the promise of a different world, and I’ve never understood the point of making music that just sounds like more of the same. Remember the first music you ever heard, what did it make you feel, imagine? Music is art and research like anything else, responding to the evolving world. “Stop making music, start making something that excites you right now.” (my personal note).
Warm thank you to everyone who came to our Musica nova 2019 – Tribute to Pan Sonic concert at the Helsinki Music Centre on Fri 1.2! It was a blast, pure joy! I feel a possible future was initiated.
I feel gratitude to the incredibly talented people I had the pleasure to play and develop the piece with: my collaborator, the musician and composer Petteri Mäkiniemi, and our cellist Jaani Helander and bass clarinettist Heikki Nikula.
My gratitude goes equally to the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Korvat auki ry and Musica nova Helsinki for inviting us and making this all possible! And not to mention the sound technician Erik Roos and visual technician Tuukka Aimasmäki for their invaluable work. And last but not least, to the fellow composer duos Ava Grayson & Tuomas Ahva, Jouni Hirvelä & Atte Häkkinen and Tytti Arola & Thorkell Nordal, whose delightfully diverse and imaginative pieces created indeed a rich and colourful evening in sound and music – similar to experiencing Pan Sonic in one of their concerts, always an adventure.
Petteri and I are currently in the studio mixing our first album that’s based on the material we developed for the concert. We’ll also release the concert recording, together with the live visual material, soon.
Here are some photos of the evening. All photos by Maarit Kytöharju (except the 2nd photo by Jukka Hautamäki).
As Petteri Mäkiniemi and I are preparing to perform in the Pan Sonic Tribute concert at the Helsinki Music Centre next Friday 1.2, as part of the Musica nova 2019 festival, we did a brief interview for the festival about the upcoming performance. The original posts are in Finnish, recreated here in English. Topic: Petteri’s Ginette and my “afrorithmic” system. ______________
In the Tribute to Pan Sonic concert the composer, music producer and sound artist Ilpo Jauhiainen and the musician, composer and instrument maker Petteri Mäkiniemi will present a partially improvised new work in which electroacoustic composition, minimalism and experimental electronic music meet West African musical influences, in a form inspired by Pan Sonic’s abstract, subdued and uncompromising aesthetic.
The concert will be realized together with musicians from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra at the Helsinki Music Centre on Fri 1 February.
Ginette
Petteri, what is Ginette?
Ginette is an electronic musical instrument designed and built
by me, based on the French ondes Martenot electronic instrument developed in
1928. Ginette is played so that the right hand controls the pitch by moving a
ring along a wire, while the left hand controls the loudness of the note with a
stepless key. The design of the instrument enables expressive gestures such as
vibrato, glissando and a wide dynamic range similar to bowed string
instruments. All this happens through the fingertips of the player, not by
turning knobs. In the musical performance I’m fascinated by the naked presence
of human condition – how for example a gentle touch of the hand or an intimate
blow from the mouth is audible in the characteristic sound of an instrument.
This is also possible in electronic music. Currently I’m developing a new, more
versatile version of Ginette.
Petteri Mäkiniemi (l) and Ilpo Jauhiainen (r). Photo: Heta Kaisto
Ilpo, in your performance you intend to use elements of field recordings made in West Africa that can be set to progress autonomously during the gig with the help of generative algorithms. What does this self-evolution of algorithms mean in terms of the live performance?
Generative i.e. self-evolving and -organizing elements bring a degree of surprise and added liveliness to the performance, both for the audience and performers alike. In this scenario, a computer sort of improvises how it transforms and reproduces the source material with the rules and processes that we’ve provided, and operates thus as one of the “human” performers. Algorithms can be designed to produce almost any kind of behaviour, but we’re fascinated mostly by certain consistency where the music evolves in a slightly random, probabilistic manner while retaining a recognizable character – like a river that flows. In our performance one of the field recordings progresses and changes quite freely on its own whereas with the others the program introduces tiny variations around the gestures made by the performer.
______________
Recently we also had our first rehearsal with the full ensemble for the concert. The ensemble consists of Jaani Helander (cello), Heikki Nikula (bass clarinet), Petteri Mäkiniemi (Ginette) and me (“afrorithmic generator”).
From the clockwise: Jaani, Heikki, Ilpo, Petteri (taking the photo)
This was my first time of playing together with members of a philharmonic orchestra, and it felt and sounded exhilarating!
This year I’ve received some truly heart-warming feedback about my debut album Shimmer & Bloom which came out seven years ago in November 2011. It’s always a life-affirming surprise when the ripples of your old work reach you after the years, to hear that the work still resonates to this day (considering the world was pretty much quiet when that album came out). This got me reflecting on the music and ideas between that first album and my newest one, Flash of the Spirit, which was released in November 2018, in particular since I feel the newest album represent a closure of a period begun by my debut.
Shimmer & Bloom was my first “official statement” of how the pop music and the world could be. After the album was released, I guess a lot of the interested people and fans expected me to continue building on the musical direction of that album: to continue becoming more pop, better and successful. One reviewer wrote: “Shimmer & Bloom is one of those albums that will continue growing for weeks and months after the first touch. Its surface seems calm at first but beneath the ethereally thin sound layers there is a lot going on that just isn’t revealed immediately. The main thread of this ambitious debut album tends to run away at times but on the whole Shimmer & Bloom is rewarding and beautiful”. This ambitious debut album…but towards what? Many didn’t know that the album represented a closure for me, of the music I’d been exploring, sketching and producing over the previous 15 years in my bedroom studios in Iisalmi, London, Helsinki and Berlin. The album was a statement for myself, to start taking my own musical interests more seriously and put an end to the endless sketching and experimentation (1). Shimmer & Bloom wasn’t a beginner’s discovery, it was me finally releasing what I’d already found, explored thoroughly and lived with for so long. And it was time to move on.
The next destination was Africa. My interest in Africa and its music goes all the way back to my childhood, to my earliest memory of making music: at the age of six I saw a documentary about a village somewhere in Africa, and its imagery and music fascinated me so much that I felt compelled to try and recreate the music and the atmosphere of the film with the electric organ at our home. I tweaked the organ’s setting in a “wrong” way until suddenly there it was: a pulsating, minimalist bass and organ motif mirroring what I’d just seen and heard. Few years later I discovered the hypnotic, minimalist mbira music of Stella Chiweshe from Zimbabwe, followed by lively, minimalist Pygmy music from Central Africa, and when I began to dabble more seriously with music production at the age of 14, these influences sought their way into the music (2). The fact that I’d never been to Africa became a fuel of imagination for a lot of the later music that I produced in my bedroom studios in London and Berlin: I wanted to create a new kind of sonic world inspired by Jon Hassell‘s Fourth World concept, the underground techno from Detroit, Warp‘s new electronica, David Byrne and Brian Eno‘s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, dub music by African Headcharge, Fela Kuti‘s Afrobeat, and by countless of other influences. I kept reading Ocean of Sound by David Toop and More Brilliant Than The Sun by Kodwo Eshun while producing nearly a thousand of sketches, backing tracks and finished ideas. Most of them are now lost to broken and stolen technology.
This “African electronic” thread was also present in our post-punk band l’ectro Q’d in London which operated between 2001 and 2004, as well as in the ethno-electronic ‘art pop’ music that I created and performed with artist Megumi Matsubara between 2004 and 2009, as Green & Ilpo.
My last bedroom studio in London (Dalston), 2004-05.
In the Spring 2011 I collaborated with the Nigerian-American painter Odili Donal Odita for our track Colourist, for a feature at Another Africa. The track was my reaction to Odita’s West African-influenced abstract geometric paintings, “the music I’d always wanted to see”. He was showing in the ARS 11 exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki at the time, and in the same exhibition were two sound works by Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh. Annoyed first by the sonic intrusion that Ogboh’s pieces created in the tranquillity of my solitary Helsinki walks (one of them was broadcasted outside Kiasma) and the simplicity of his presentation, I was moved by the incredible richness of his Lagos Soundscapes once I began to listen. I knew immediately that there was a whole new musical dimension embedded in these soundscapes: music that would emerge from the everyday life, be woven in the fabric of living like buying clothes at a jostling market or hustling for a medicine on a crowded bus. An ‘urban music’ created by a city itself.
Finally I got to visit Africa: first in Senegal for the Dakar Biennale in 2012, then at an art residency in Benin for three months in 2013, during which I travelled also to Burkina Faso, Togo and Nigeria (where I met and stayed with Emeka Ogboh in Lagos, among others). These travels infected me with rhythm fever, joy and colours of life. The West African funk, afrobeat, highlife and gospel that I heard at this corner bar in Ouagadougou alone, through its dusty one-speaker soundsystem, changed me forever: the sound was so raw, distorted, full of soul that I felt flashes of spirits charging through me (could’ve been also flashes of pastis, not sure). I kept having epiphanies.
I rediscovered a new joy for making music, for being here, for this multitude of colours and cultures and shared possibilities that the Earth presents.
This West African experience subsequently gave rise to the albums Arrival City, Sahara, LOS-HEL: Possible Cities (with Emeka Ogboh), Pulses / Radiance, and Flash of the Spirit.
And now I feel that with the new album a certain chapter is closing. The period from Shimmer & Bloom to Flash of the Spirit has seen me refining, exploring and discovering my musical voice, my sound, and reason for making music. I call this my “pop period” even though the music can hardly be called pop. Pulses / Radiance aside, it’s characterized by short 3-minute melodic tracks, youthful experimentation, search for my place in music, and by my desire to please audiences (3); it’s also unified by the fact that most pieces on these albums were initiated during those innocent and productive “imaginary Africa” years in London and Berlin 1999-2010, when I dreamt of becoming a pop producer akin to Brian Eno, Timbaland or Quincy Jones (etc.). With Shimmer & Bloom I set out to see if I can actually finish a whole album of the music I believed in and present it proudly to the world. This was followed by the passion to create a new kind of music that would bridge my interests of the West African musics and the Western electronic music. And I feel I’ve achieved all that – apart from becoming Quincy Jones (Michael Jackson never called, bugger). Personally I found the pop music of the future world I’d like to inhabit.
I’m done with trying to be popular, trying to play safe, trying to prove my credentials. Been there, done that. From now on I’m just making music, crafting what I feel is the most exciting thing sonically, musically and culturally. I have found my voice: pop or experimental, African or European – I really don’t care. It’s just music, it’s just me. All I know is that I want to go deeper with what I’ve found.
1 And none of this might have happened if I hadn’t met with my dear London-era friend Lee in Berlin (where she now lives), when during our breakfast at Ankerklause she said that you never become an artist unless you finish and release your work, and take the responsibility for that.
2 Not as straightforward sounds or music but more in terms of rhythm, sensitivity and overall aesthetics: repetition, patterns and complexity through simplicity.
3 This is not to dismiss the seriousness, criticality, passion and commitment that I’ve invested in every track and album – I wouldn’t have released any of these if I didn’t think there was a worthwhile idea behind each of them.
Afrorithm in the house. I’m currently preparing for this special concert with a good friend of mine (and very talented musician) Petteri Mäkiniemi, at the Helsinki Music Centre next February. The concert will be a tribute to the pioneering Finnish electronic music duo Pan Sonic, and it’ll form part of the Musica Nova Helsinki contemporary music festival 2019.
Our idea is to create a new kind of music in which the aesthetics of Arvo Pärt and Olivier Messiaen meet those of West African musics, through the minimalist and sometimes brutalist aesthetics of Pan Sonic (we are also inspired by Jon Hassell’s musical concept known as Fourth World). Petteri plays his self-built instrument Ginette, which is based on the ondes martenot (and which appears on my album Pulses / Radiance), while I play my generative system called Afrorithm (Afrobeat + algorithmic composition). We’ll be joined on stage by a cellist and a bass clarinettist from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.
So far we’ve had two rehearsals. While these began as innocent jam sessions for the concert only, we soon realized that we’d created an album’s worth of beautiful, new kind of music – less polished and produced, more spontaneous, candid and human; pastoral, orchestral, African and futuristic (the word ‘evergreen’ keeps also coming to mind). After six extensively crafted studio albums it feels invigorating to arrive somewhere fresh and fully formed so effortlessly, as if we had simply channelled this music onto the tape. Our plan now is to bring this serendipitous album out into the daylight early next year, possibly around the time of the concert…
The film composer Hans Zimmer said that music is at its best when it’s about people playing together in a room. I agree with him. As a music producer you mostly release your long crafted labours of love as digital downloads and streams only, and the work then drifts in isolation in an obscure world of internet clouds and distant servers. It’s all fine as a distribution model (barring the energy consumption of those servers) but you rarely get to hear and feel how the listeners react when they listen to your music; the function and purpose of your music, if any, remains mystery. But when it’s just even two people playing together in the same room, immersed in the moment and moved by each other’s sound and playing, you remember why you love music, and why it has become such an important tool for you to explore and understand this complex world pulsing with new possibilities.
My new album Flash of the Spirit is out now. This is my sixth album, and it builds on the direction begun on my previous albums Arrival City, Sahara and LOS-HEL: Possible Cities.
The album is inspired by my travels and experiences in West Africa. It’s a reflection on a kind of liminal global space, imaginary and real, that exists in between and beyond cultures, nations, borders, ecosystems, beliefs, social constructs, identities and differences. This space is always in the state of becoming: changing, emerging and suggesting new possibilities.
Similarly, the music defies any clear categorization and well-established aesthetics, existing and moving between Minimalism, Afrobeat, Electronica, Krautrock, Gospel, Ambient and West African traditional musics – as if heard and treated through a slightly futuristic perspective. My idea has been to make an approachable yet artistically uncompromising, melodic, rhythmic, emotive record, one that can grow on repeated listening over time. I always imagine the music that I’m making belonging to a possible future world (“music holds the promise of a different world”).
The title refers to the book of the same name by Robert Farris Thompson, which I’d read during my residency in Benin. It’s also a nod to the album of the same name by Jon Hassell & Farafina. It’s also a reference to those great “flashes of the spirit” that I kept coming across on my travels.
The album is available now on my Bandcamp site, and on all the other digital music stores and streaming services from 2 November onwards.
composer / sound artist / writer 