Helsinki

‘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.

Absent City

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.

Photography: Sebastian Mayer

Ginette & Afrorithm – Musica nova 2019 Q&A

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.
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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.

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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!

Serendipity, surrender and the return of Afrorithm

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.