Taavettilan riihi. This is the oldest building in Jyväskylä, Finland – and the site of my next sound installation!

I really love working on site-specific installations: engaging in local conditions and creating a novel kind of work that exists between architecture, environment and music – and in this case, also poetry!

While this won’t be my first site-specific piece to use spoken word*, it’ll be the first one to focus primarily on poetry, drawing from texts and voices of contemporary local poets. And I couldn’t be more thrilled: after all, this is a city known as the capital of Finnish hip hop and the Athens of Finland – not to mention for its vibrant literary scene – celebrated for its inventive command of the language.

Instead of drifting in distant server clouds as music releases do (Earth Variations, how’s the world receiving you?!?), the music in site-specific pieces becomes rooted in real habitats, acquiring new spatial and social possibilities as well as responsibilities; it becomes locally meaningful and not just globally meaningless.

And any feedback you receive for your work comes from real living beings, not from marketing spam bots (as you mostly do online).

The installation will be presented during the opening weekend for the autumn season of the city of Jyväskylä’s Taidekatu (Art Street), September 6-8. More info in due course.

* My very first site-specific sound installation, Nordic Staircases at the Round Chapel in London in 2001, was based on a recording of a poem of mine, read in different Nordic languages and electronically treated to correspond with the acoustics of the chapel’s large staircase.