Omar Harb

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.

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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…

Glisten

‘Glisten’ from the album Interspaces (2022). The original footage in this visual contemplation is from the Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, filmed in October 2020.

Glisten shares the same journey as the album’s opening track Petals, emerging in that same summer night on the organic farm in Suonenjoki, Finland, 25 years ago. While noodling on my synthesizer in this wooden cabin by a pond – my studio and rehearsal space, surrounded by forests and fields – I was contemplating the nocturnal mist hovering above the still surface of the water outside my window, interrupted only occasionally by two swans gliding quietly together. The world was serene and limpid, illuminated by a full moon and the afterglow of a midnight sun. Suddenly, a scintillating melodic pattern began to emerge, as if petals of a flower that had begun to unfold and reveal the bloom inside; this was followed by another, a more “starry sky glistening above a Northern wilderness” kind of pattern. A couple of years later in London, a friend of mine asked if he could use both tracks as background music for his painting exhibition, and for the purposes of the show I added the voice of this Finnish girl reading a poem of mine (in Finnish), this time harmonised and vocoded into a more abstract and ethereal layer.

For the next 20 years the piece remained unchanged – and unreleased, despite my efforts to find a suitable context and form for it – until one Spring morning in Paris when I finally figured out how to continue with the music (“there’s nothing worse than a brilliant beginning” – Picasso). The initial updated version became closer to industrial electro though, with syncopated beats and bassist Omar Harb delivering a motorik funky bassline beating even the machine in precision, duration and slight liveliness (I intend to release this version in future); for the album I opted for a more spacious and emptier take, making the original ambient track the central element, reducing the beats to a minimum, and replacing the synths and basslines with the abstracted voice of Lucia Munenge from the Absent River piece. As with Petals, there were no swans gliding on a moonlit pond outside my window upon the track’s completion but a soft hum of the Parisian night traffic, a couple of faintly glistening stars in the piece of sky above, and a sense of a fresh new dawn.

Interspaces is out now

My new album Interspaces is now available for streaming on all major music platforms.

The album is also available on Bandcamp where the release includes higher quality audio download and extended album artwork. In the end I decided to make two initially planned bonus tracks part of the official album since – thanks to the brilliant mastering once again by Gregor Zemljic – their inclusion felt natural, necessary and uplifting.

“Interspaces – my tenth album (including two collaborations) – presents 11 tracks of largely electronic instrumentals with abstracted vocals, drawing from electronic, popular, contemporary and global musics. The initial idea has been to explore a new kind of beauty and sensitivity, spatiality and intricacy in music. The album features contributions from soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko @viktoriiavitrenko, bassist Omar Harb @omarharbmusic, and musician and Ginette player Petteri Mäkiniemi @petterimakiniemi.

Influenced by diverse ecosystems and worlds between vast empty landscapes and pulsating global metropolises, the music is furthermore inspired by the idea of globality and mundialization as well as the city of Paris where the album was produced between 2020 and 2022.”

With every release you try to reimagine the future world. And the feedback I’ve received so far regarding the new album has confirmed that music and sound, even those made by me, indeed have the capability to bring us to the world as it exists without being reduced, represented, distorted and clouded by ideologies – economic, political and religious constructs – and to show the potentiality and possibilities that the life, physical and nonphysical, continue to suggest. A complex, ambiguous, evolving, creative, more invigorating and freer state of existence: “a dawn of the world” as philosopher Deleuze described it. Or as Björk said, “this universe is truly a magnificent spectacle, and needs to be mirrored”. That’s why we have art, music and science.

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I would like to thank you for all your support and feedback so far, it’s been the most inspiring and catalyzing to receive and hear. I feel I’m at the beginning of a new musical discovery and adventure, and I hope many of you will continue to share this future journey with me as well.

Naturally I would also like to extend my heartfelt gratitude once again to Viktoriia, Omar and Petteri for their invaluable contribution to the album, and to Gregor Zemljic for his genius-like/zen-level mastering of the music. I’m delighted that this same group of collaborators and talent will be featuring on my next album Earth Variations as well.

With warmth and care,

Ilpo