Ilpo

My new album SIINTO out now

My new album SIINTO is out now. Hooray!

This Bandcamp release will shortly be followed by all the other streaming platforms (incl. the unethical Spotify).

This has been my most challenging release to date, in terms of its scope and complexity. But I’m utterly thrilled with the results – and in the process I discovered a new kind of musical thinking that will form the basis of my unfolding doctoral studies from now on.

I hope you will enjoy this sonic journey (it may require some time and space, I admit).

Warmth X

SIINTO (Finnish for ‘shimmer’, ‘dawn’, ‘reflection’, ‘glow’) presents three compositions – or ‘geomusical objects’, as I began to hear them – that play with the notion of music as an environment and environment as music, exploring the potential between geography and music.

The tracks are long (20 minutes), with the ‘hooks’ occurring slowly and gradually over the course of the entire tracks; this is to better cater to the current demand for 2-minute songs with instant 15-second hooks.

(for a new culture is to be found in the spaces, silences and ruptures too incomprehensible to the optimisation algorithms)

It is meant as music to swim in, roam through, get lost in or bored by, zoom in/out of, journey with, discover alongside other things, be exited and returned to at any point.

Siinto and its variation Saraste (‘morning’, ‘dusk’, ‘first light’) originate from my artist residency at KulttuuriKauppila in Ii, Finland, July-August 2024: while there, I was invited to create a site-specific live performance that drew its inspiration and most of its sonic material from the local geography of Ii. The title track also features the voice of a dear friend who was born in Ii, abstracted from a poetry recording we had made years earlier; and while in the performance the voice travelled as a clearer figure in a landscape, here it has become more ecological – a sustaining part of that environment.

Kajo (‘soft light’, ‘reflection’) forms the backing track I created for poet Sanna Karlström’s spoken word performance at Sähkö #42 in Jyväskylä, Finland, September 2023. The idea has again been for a situation/site-specific soundscape composition, drawing thematically and sonically from the local environment and culture – and, in this case, from the content of Karlström’s poems as well. The collaboration was made possible by my residency at the Writers’ House/Kirjailijatalo in Jyväskylä, May-December 2023.

A particularly vital layer in these geomusical objects emerges from the ‘stratified’ recordings of Ginette, originally performed by Petteri Mäkiniemi (the inventor of this wonderful electronic instrument).

My deepest gratitude to Petteri Mäkiniemi, Heta Kaisto, Sanna Karlström, Gregor Zemljic, Diego Castro-Magas and Alicia Reyes for bringing this album to life; the Orpheus Instituut; and to KulttuuriKauppila and Kirjailijatalo for their transformative residencies and generous invitations for me to engage meaningfully with their respective localities.

A new album / (r)evolutions

June 20

While Finland and the rest of the Nordic countries are celebrating the Midsummer, our research cluster MetamusicX at Orpheus Instituut here in Ghent is celebrating the ends of very long yet transformative journeys, and the beginnings of rather exciting new ones! (more info on the latter in the autumn)

For my dear colleague Alicia (not pictured here) and me, it’s the completion of our compulsory doctoral studies and the start of full immersion into our respective research-based practices; for our dear friend and colleague Adam (pictured here), it’s the completion of his dissertation and becoming a post-doctoral fellow in our cluster, joining Diego, Martin and Paulo. New (r)evolutions are in the air!

I feel utterly lucky having found and become part of this research cluster (and Orpheus Instituut in general): the level of critical, experimental, creative, open-ended, rigorous and enthusiastic thinking – not to mention the sense of humour – has finally provided space for my own expression to flourish; I find myself in a place where all my diverse interests are able to converge, coalesce – and potentially evolve into something new and meaningful! Yet this should be a basic condition for every citizen on Earth: the freedom, safety and unconditional support to discover and pursue one’s dreams, no matter the background. Why can’t we solve this simple societal design on a global scale?

P.S. My new album SIINTO will be out as soon as I receive the final masters from my mastering engineer…

June 2

A quick update. My new album SIINTO will be out this month. Yay!

The exact release date is difficult to set though, as I’m still listening to and deciding on the final masters. But like the music itself, the release process can also be emergent, gradual, soft, incidental, serendipitous, rule-breaking – no need for the usual hyping and stuff!

The release has been delayed by my compulsory, first-year doctoral studies: I’ve been utterly busy with the many exciting new projects, encounters and discourses this year has brought (attached a few random, recent photos I’ve managed to take, mostly unrelated to my topics, of course). And the album, for its part, has become an opening, an inception, for a whole new research avenue and artistic thinking that will form the core of my studies from now on. Rather thrilled!

More info soon/in due course. Greetings from a sunny and warm, verdant Ghent!

Bloom out now

My new album Bloom is out now.

This initial Bandcamp release will be followed by all the other streaming platforms (including the thieving Spotify) later on.

The album features eight tracks of my older electronica works – electronic poems and vignettes, if you like – most of them outtakes or alternative versions from my previous albums.

The tracks span the years 2001-2014, and they have been recorded in London, Tokyo, Berlin, Helsinki and Barcelona. The album also features a previously unreleased track from my earlier collaboration with poet Rick Holland.

Naturally there’d have been hundreds of more tracks to include from that period, but I’ve always felt that these eight particular pieces condensed the idea I was now after: that of fragility, subtlety, tenderness and sensuousness in electronic music.

At the same time, Bloom feels like a swan song to the kind of electronic music I’d been making since that summer of 1993 and all the way until 2020: my interest in beat-driven electronica with synths and drum machines has since evolved toward other forms of composition and musical possibilities.

As a listener, though, it’s a different story, and I still very much enjoy those synths and drum machines, melodies with inventive beats. Hence this modest, one last contribution to that world of future music.

“Our real power in this world is our ability to care, nurture, protect, share, create, cooperate, preserve, and love. Any other attempt at power is merely a form of cowardice, of unimaginative and inconceivable loss – pure illusion.”

Hope you’ll enjoy discovering it!

Earth Variations – streaming everywhere

Pleased to announce that my new album Earth Variations is now available on all the major streaming services worldwide.

Links to the album on selected streaming platforms

I’m truly excited – and relieved – to finally have this album completely released and out in the world. It’s been years in the making, with unexpected detours and discoveries along the way.

I’m truly grateful to the brilliant artists and musicians who made this album possible: Viktoriia Vitrenko @viktoriiavitrenko on vocals and voice, Omar Harb @omarharbmusic on bass, Petteri Mäkiniemi @petterimakiniemi on Ginette, Nazim Bakour @nazimbakour on electric guitar, Em’kal Eyongakpa on field recordings. And to the brilliant Gregor Zemljic @gregor_zemljic_gz_mastering for mastering the album with such care.

Thank you also to the similarly brilliant Lee Clough @leeclough, whose original photograph (now obscured by my yellow haze) inspired both the visual and sonic direction of the album. And for her Indian riverscape tape recording that first set me off for unearthing these possible musical geographies (back in 2000!).

My gratitude and warmth also extend to everyone else whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet along this journey – there are simply too many of you to mention here 🙂 – as well as to the Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR) and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for their invaluable support. Thank you.

Keep rocking X
______
“Earth Variations explores the idea of music as an embodied and possible geography: a milieu, landscape, terrain, situation, condition, atmosphere. It is inspired by our unique, complex planet in a state of flux. Featuring contributions from soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko, bassist Omar Harb, Ginette player Petteri Mäkiniemi, guitarist Nazim Bakour, and sound artist Em’kal Eyongakpa, the music has been composed and recorded in London, Saarbrücken, Espoo, Douala and Paris between 2004 and 2023.”

Earth Variations out now

My new album Earth Variations is out now. Finally, phew!

Earth Variations on Bandcamp

This Bandcamp release includes high quality download and additional artwork. The album will be available on all the other streaming services in early June (the exact release date to be confirmed).

Earth Variations is inspired by our unique, complex planet in a state of flux – a world that our escapist political and economic ideologies, against all the actual intelligence and knowledge, continue to regard as a resource to be exploited and exhausted rather than an opportunity to be nurtured and shared. (Or perhaps it’s no longer about ideologies and escapism but pure greed and indifference.)

Drawing from the notion of geophilosophy – “earth-thinking” originally conceived by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to consider the relation between thought and environment (concepts created through the relationship between territory and earth) – the album explores the idea of music as an embodied and possible geography: a milieu, landscape, terrain, situation, condition, atmosphere. In this sense, it follows the map initially drawn by artists such as Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Bernard Parmegiani, Biosphere, Ben Frost and Björk (and many others, even those without the initial B) while adding its own, previously uncharted regions to it: musically it journeys in a less familiar territory between the habitats of contemporary classical, experimental electronic, world and possible musics – occasionally reaching a more elevated ground to gaze at these more familiar vistas on the horizon.

The album features contributions from soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko, bassist Omar Harb, Ginette player Petteri Mäkiniemi, guitarist Nazim Bakour, and sound artist Em’kal Eyongakpa. The music has been composed and recorded in various locations in London, Saarbrücken, Espoo, Douala and Paris between 2004 and 2023. The album has been mastered by Gregor Zemljic (Earresistible Mastering).

The cover art includes original photography by Lee Clough of the Wadi Rum desert, Jordan. Lee is the main culprit/catalyst in this story: it was her low quality cassette tape, which she’d recorded during a boat ride in the Ganges river near Varanasi in India and which she’d lent me back in London in early 2000, that first gave me the idea of music as a possible geography, landscape and place – or geography/landscape/place as a possible music. I became entranced by that tape and the world, possible and real, its sonic content and quality painted; I even failed my first year of Sonic Arts studies because I insisted on incorporating the tape into my compositions despite the clear instruction not to use any field recordings at that stage. I couldn’t resist: that early morning/late evening river atmosphere with people and cows passing, smoke from the riverbanks rising, gentle engines droning, birds and monkeys calling – everything punctuated by Lee’s joyful, sometimes perplexed, shrieks and comments – represented to me the very essence of life, of being alive in this world: no ideologies or escapism, simply being immersed in the landspace, embracing the world.

Fast-forward to 2015 and the European refugee crisis. Instigated by the geopolitical situation, Earth Variations started as an extensive sound art project about migration, conflicts and borders. However, since I was unable to secure funding for its realisation, the initial sketches gradually evolved into instrumental compositions of their own, still carrying those themes at their core but in more abstract forms.

Years later I would find myself overdubbing these compositions with bassist Omar Harb in a studio in the vibrantly multicoloured 10th arrondissement of Paris. Suddenly I felt struck: here I was with a guy who actually came from one of the origins of that crisis, who had experienced the war firsthand, personally witnessing the destruction and tragedy of everyone and everything close to him, eventually having to flee his home across terrains and territories toward a more possible future. Yet here he was in front of me, playing the most beautiful and life-affirming music that seemed to know no crises, conflicts, borders, ideologies, territories – let alone any art projects, curatorioral practices and their momentary trends. This was simply life: this was why music existed.

Later that summer of 2021, when we were recording vocals with Ukrainian soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko at the Cité des arts in Paris, the war in Ukraine was yet to happen. In fact, the idea of a new war in the world would have seemed like the most ridiculous prospect back then, since wars belonged to the juvenile and less enlightened world of the past – and we lived in a civilized world of now…

Hope you’ll enjoy discovering the music X

Phew and gratitude

Spring makes noise!

Pleased to announce that my new album Earth Variations will finally be out on May 15. The initial Bandcamp release, with additional artwork and higher quality download, will arrive on all the other streaming platforms in early June.

The release has been delayed by my doctoral programme application, which has taken most of my spring. Excited to announce that I’ve finally been accepted to the prestigious and advanced Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium! Phew (and gratitude). For the next four years, I’ll be researching the future of music and developing a novel environmental AI application while enjoying some waffles and chocolate.

The mastering of the album has also taken longer than usual, since this one required “gardening, not architecture” (after Brian Eno): putting your gloves on and tending carefully the delicate textures and colours the album is made of. Yet I knew that my inimitable mastering engineer, Gregor Zemljic (at Earresistible Mastering), would be able to rise to the challenge, preserving the fragile, unique qualities of the original while enhancing them greatly. And he did!

Phew and gratitude.

These also extend to the Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR) for their two-year artist grant, and to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for their six-month artist grant, both which enable me to focus on my current stage of artistic research and production with the depth, immersion, time and care they require. Thank you, SKR and Taike. The future suddenly feels possible in its improbable brightness.

Keep redesigning the world. Stubbornly.

Marseille, France, 2021. One of the many places visited on the album.

A new album out in March 2024

Five years ago today. Finishing the dress rehearsal for our Musica nova 2019 concert at the Helsinki Music Centre: Jaani Helander on cello, Heikki Nikula on bass clarinet, me on afrorithmics, and – hiding behind the camera – Petteri Mäkiniemi on Ginette.

The idea for my forthcoming album Earth Variations (out in March!) was born in those rehearsals and recording sessions, when we were developing our commissioned piece and experimenting with instrumentation and possible musical geographies. The album also features, among others, Petteri Mäkiniemi on Ginette (an electronic instrument designed and built by him, based on the French ondes Martenot electronic instrument developed in 1928).

It’s been quite a journey since (via Paris!), and I feel I’m looking at this picture from a higher, different plane/plateau now. There’s always been a great joy and freedom in everything I do – at the expense of a faster and greater success, I suppose – but the more you do and search and find, the deeper and more genuine this joy and freedom seem to become. It’s all about enjoying and being attentive to the process more than aiming for some set goals. As David Bowie said:

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

I certainly felt like swimming when performing alongside these genuinely talented musicians.

Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, Paris, 7 April 2021.

Coincidentally, I also set out on my music-making adventure in 1993; in 2021, I was recording overdubs for Earth Variations in a studio in this very neighbourhood as pictured (Studio Bleu, 10th arrondissement).

My instagram scribble at the time:

“Cycling around Paris makes one feel alive, as if going around the world. The city was an instant crush back in 1995, and continues to be a discovery, with a lot of random access memories and novel outlands from the fragments of time. A multitude that’s human after all. #dafunk“

Sähkö #42

Sähkö Club #42 at Vakiopaine, Jyväskylä, 9.9.2023. [a delayed repost from other social media]

What a wonderful evening! Thank you again to the audience, the performers, the Vakiopaine staff and of course the organisers, Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry, for inviting me.

It was a pure delight to perform to such a full house and receptive audience. After Japan, this was probably the most attentive and engaged audience I’ve had the pleasure to play for. Audiences everywhere have naturally tended to be attentive and receptive – bar the lovely but lively crowd in an El Raval gallery in Barcelona once – but there are times when the vibe from the crowd feels especially warm that it becomes part of your playing, elevating the performance differently.

And when your friends surprise you by travelling across the country to see you play, the evening feels truly special.

Thank you again to the brilliant poet Sanna Karlström for the beautiful performance together. I feel like we invented a new form of sonic art between poetry and music – at least it felt to me like wandering in another green sonic world. I’ll certainly be exploring this Terrestrial style (and its budding subgenres) more; Sanna and I will also continue performing (and possibly recording) together in the future.

Thank you also to Petteri Mäkiniemi for his fantastic, prerecorded Ginette performance that formed part of my solo live-set (I’ll post the backing track online soon).

After my solo set this woman came to tell me how my music had enabled her to travel to the time before the dinosaurs. I was flattered by this most unexpected comment – and slightly disappointed: I’d wanted to take the listeners toward the far future instead, to the time after the current dinosaurs (the fossil capitalists). But I guess any kind of time travel / possible world experience should be regarded as a success.

Warmth x

New energy / Dancers

‘Dancers’ from the album Interspaces (2022). This visualizer is made entirely of footage filmed in the Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, October 2020.

This will be the last video painting/visual contemplation for the Interspaces album – unless some visual artist wants to make a proper video artwork to accompany the music. I will now quieten for my writing residency in Finland for the next six months, focusing on my upcoming book on the future society through sonic arts while also finalising the album Earth Variations, to be released in the autumn (depending on the funding).

‘Dancers’ was originally made for the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in 2010, to be used in the background for the reading of Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s book The Tightrope Walker. In the reading, five voice actors read passages from the book in five different languages: the minimalist ambient/background drone on the track itself is made entirely from the voice of one of these actors – a Ghanaian man reading in Twi – modeled acoustically through a sustained note of a string instrument. The rest of the music was completed at the Cité des arts residency in Paris in 2021, with everything recorded in one improvised take after another during one particularly tender yet elated late night studio session. All subsequent attempts to “improve” these initial takes simply failed to capture the fullness of life in that moment in time, so eventually I left everything as it had first come into being: earnest, imperfect and pristine.

One strong influence on the music – apart from O Superman by Laurie Anderson – was the painting Dance (La Danse) by Henri Matisse, made in 1910. While recording, I suddenly started picturing the painting and the rhythm and movement of its figures and colours. In fact, all my music has been rather strongly influenced by the painting style in question: Fauvism!

Bright Blue

‘Bright Blue’ from the album Interspaces (2022). The track features Omar Harb on melodic bass. The original light reflection footage in this visualizer is by Petteri Mäkiniemi, provided courtesy of the artist.

—-

Bright Blue continues to be the most downloaded and streamed track from the album. If I actually had the resources, the music video for this would consists of a dancer performing a minimalistic yet inventively elaborate and graceful contemporary dance choreography. The scenography – lighting, set and costume design – as well as the cinematography would reflect this in a similar fashion, exuding some kind of timeless futurity.

The title itself is a take on Pale Blue Dot, a phrase coined by astronomer and author Carl Sagan reflecting on the final photograph of planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe before it exited the Solar System and headed toward interstellar space. While we indeed live on a tiny pale blue dot – contrary to the delusions of grandeur of some nationalist leaders and fervent tribalist ideologues – Earth is also a bright blue marble gliding in the vastness of space, shimmering with life and its vast, shared and diverse potential (although if the late capitalists and their fervent ideologues get their own delusions satisfied, Earth could very well turn into a carbon black hole – or pit?). In terms of planets, ‘bright blue’ is often used to describe Neptune, which I must have flown by at some point when working on the music. In any case, this was simply a working title, and since giving titles is the hardest part of the creative process, you are often stuck with the file name you hastily improvised when saving the initial sketch.

We recorded Omar’s bass at Studio Bleu in the vibrantly multicoloured 10th arrondissement of Paris. Afterwards, while Omar had to leave for his next rehearsal, I sat down for a glass of wine at my favourite café next door, where the colour of my usual corner table is baby blue. The blues caused by my recent heartbreak had begun to fade and the future was starting to appear bright again: like that azure morning sky in a turquoise Mediterranean bay later that summer…

composer / sound artist / writer