mastering – composer / sound artist / writer

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.

My new album Sharawadji will be out on Saturday 1 Jan 2022.

I know it’s an unusual release date: new releases are often unveiled on Fridays, and rarely early in the year. But this is an unusual release (at least for me) – and I feel the characteristics of the music fit the idea of “something new”, celebration, breaking habits. It’ll be initially available on Bandcamp only, appearing on all the other streaming services later in January (the exact delivery date is yet to be set).

I’ve been listening to the mastered version of the album for the last couple of weeks now – and I cannot believe how amazing it sounds! Even my mastering engineer was enthusing about how much he enjoyed working on this album (and this is a guy who masters records for a lot of the global music stars, including my inspirations like Brian Eno and the late Jon Hassell, the inventor of Possible Musics). He really did the most amazing job, making this colourful, diverse album sound like one unified experience as if all the tracks were actually created for this album originally*.

Paris was the city where I first got an idea for a kind of global, genreless and borderless, possible music – and here I am, 26 years later, making exactly the kind of music I’d imagined while sitting on the Pont des Arts all those years ago and listening to this wonderful Malian musician perform with a badly distorted amplifier. The fruit ripens slowly indeed (as the Indian saying goes).

Have a wonderful and relaxing holidays!

* One of the tracks was started with a dear friend of mine back in London in 1996, and I still remember the moment he played an updated version of it over the phone while I was standing in a telephone booth in a warm Amsterdam night: I’d never heard anything like it before, and the novelty and energy of his drum patterns pulsating down the line made me so high – well, higher than I already was. It was then, in that booth, that I realised the possibilities of (electronic dance) music were way vaster and way more imaginative than what our (techno) culture at the time promoted and favoured… it made me also realise there was so much more potential in this world if we just try, as my friend had just doubted his abilities as music producer before my departure; alone in our flat and with all the time and space around him, he’d discovered his talent and passion…And now I’m really happy that a new version of this track found its way onto this record: a sonic memory of those youthful experiments back in the day, carried through the decades and infused with (even more) youthful experiments of today.