Petteri Mäkiniemi

Earth Variations out now

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

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

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

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…

Petals

‘Petals’ from the new album Interspaces, featuring Petteri Mäkiniemi on Ginette. A proper music video/short film for the track is currently being developed with this internationally acclaimed media artist, and it will be released sometime next Spring (due to time and budget constraints). I wanted to try some visual experiment for the piece now, however, while the album is still fresh…

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Petals has been 24 years in the making. The ambient background was created during a summer night in 1998 in Suonenjoki, Finland: I had my studio and rehearsal space in this wooden cabin by a pond, surrounded by forests and fields on an organic farm where I spent that summer working, and while I was recording, I could see through my window nocturnal mist hovering above the still surface of the water, interrupted only by two swans gliding quietly together. The landscape was illuminated by a full moon and the reflection of a midnight sun. A couple of years later in London a friend of mine wanted to use the track as background music for his painting exhibition, and for the purposes of the show I added a voice of this Finnish girl reading a poem of mine (in Finnish), timestretched 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 I finally realised how to continue with the music. Petals was finally finished during a summer night in 2021 at my Cité des arts studio in Paris: going through a heartbreak caused by this artist (coincidentally from Finland), I felt the piece was still missing something until I stumbled upon a lone Ginette recording Petteri had made and sent me the year before; Ginette’s expressive power and harmonic progression matched both the existing composition and, with some added raw distortion, my emotive state perfectly, as if recorded specifically for this piece, and brought the composition and my broken heart finally to a close. There were no swans gliding on a moonlit pond outside my window that night but a soft hum of the Parisian traffic, a couple of nocturnal birds singing, and a sense of a 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

Spring Makes Noise

Spring makes noise – and certainly so in the studio! A short update on what’s kept me busy and inspired recently.

I’m currently working on three different albums which will be released this year. The process of finishing them is slower than usual since I’m also researching and writing my Master’s thesis at the same time: it’s a philosophical adventure about generative music, complexity and “new future environments” but let’s not go into that now…

The first, still untitled album is my collaboration with Petteri Mäkiniemi which will be out in June. It combines Petteri’s self-designed and -built instrument Ginette with my “afrorithmic” system, and the result is rather beautiful and human, new kind of electronic music, mostly thanks to Petteri’s playing and the sound of Ginette (I’m just trying to hide in the background as much as possible). Musically it’s inspired by artists like Arvo Pärt, Cluster, Fela Kuti and Pan Sonic, to name a few.

The second one is my follow-up to Flash of the Spirit (2018) which will be out in July. It builds on the discoveries I’d made on that album as well as on Shimmer & Bloom (2011) and Arrival City (2013). 10 melodic and rhythmic ‘electronic contemplations’ of (the complexity of) the world. Somewhere between Seun Kuti’s Afrobeat, Aphex Twin’s electro, Kraftwerk’s pop, Erik Satie’s piano compositions and Grace Jones’ funk…so hard to define. (it’s basically me failing to make pop music that sounds like ‘pop music’ and ending up somewhere different 😉)

The third one is my experimental “World” album, currently titled Earth Variations. It started originally as a more extensive sound art project about migration, conflicts and borders, but since I wasn’t able to secure funding for its realisation, the initial sketches gradually evolved into instrumental compositions of their own. It still carries those themes at its core but in more abstract forms. The music builds on the ideas touched on Pulses / Radiance (2017), and is inspired by Jon Hassell’s Fourth World, Ben Frost’s industrial music and Steve Reich’s ensemble pieces among others. It’ll be released in October.

Thanks for reading!

composer / sound artist / writer