Earth Variations

Our golden age now

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.

‘Undiscovered Planet’ – music for immersion

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.

Upcoming musics (Spring 2023)

/// Updates ///

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 🙂 )

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).

composer / sound artist / writer