possible music

Our golden age now

Happy New Year! Let’s hope it’ll be peaceful and prosperous for us all, bringing many new joys and adventures along the way.

This year will see, among others, the release of my album Earth Variations – finally! (it’s hard to let go as I keep enjoying inhabiting its sensuous possible world, from improbable musics to possible musics, exploring its dynamic and immersive territories between music, environment, geography, soundscape and abstract art). The release has been delayed until March-April though: I’ve been unable to work on it properly during the holidays (a lack of quiet space), I cannot afford to finance its mastering at the moment (after ten albums, my personal well has run dry) – but also because of one beautiful, serendipitous discovery over the holidays.

I had asked a dear friend of mine to provide a spoken word part in her native Urdu (beautiful language!) for the remaining unfinished piece, and when we finally sat down at this luminous Belle Époque/1920s’ café to discuss the piece, she asked if I preferred the poem she’d chosen to be spoken or sung. I was confused: “can you sing?” I’d known this loveliest human being for two years, and it was only now that she told me she’s also a trained singer in Indian and Pakistani classical music! (I’d been looking for such a singer for a while now, but without funding it’s difficult to find the collaborators you need). To me, she’d always been just one of the most brilliant anthropologists, architects and visual artists out there – yet here she was, beginning to sing these romantic classical Pakistani songs softly into my ear in the most enchanting voice over our candlelit coffee table. If there’s a celestial version of us all, it’s certainly through singing. Above us, the old Parisian street lamps, a crescent Moon and five planets of the solar system shone brightly; at one end of the street, the grand Opéra house appeared majestic and dreamy in its evening lighting, at the other, the Louvre Museum continued to glow gently. This was probably Midnight in Paris, and I was accompanying Paul Gauguin, Claude Debussy and others in their quest for faraway places: yet it was just Saadia and me at a crowded Belle Époque/1920s’ café, envisioning our future performances and recordings in Paris together. The faraway had been explored (and exploited, unfortunately), now it was all about the complex, multicultural hybrid future ahead of us to discover and cultivate – and it is bright as far as culture is concerned.

We’ll be recording vocals on few more tracks to see how her voice might work on this album. There’s a sense of a journey toward home, a circle closing: the biggest musical influence on the album has been the late American trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, who in turn studied Indian classical singing with Pandit Pran Nath, transforming that singing technique into his trumpet playing and thus discovering his unique sound, combined with electronics and novel rhythms…

Have a great start of the year X

PS. A couple of official photos of the performances at the 2022 Prince Claus Impact Awards Ceremony in Amsterdam last month (received them recently). Photography: Frank van Beek.

Serene noise

Listening to the final version of the Interspaces album (before mastering) in the heat and bustle of Paris, after having finished everything in the tranquility and bloom of Finland. It strikes me that the record exists exactly between these two worlds and landscapes: there’s a refreshing heat, bustling tranquility, serene noise, horizontal and vertical variations; a certain timelessness of something with a long history; celebration, contemplation and complexity of all things life. (yet I wish I could take a dip in that still, fresh lake while enjoying the heat and sounds of the city) Can’t wait to share this record with the world X

New album out on 1 Jan 2022

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.

Sharawadji: a new release coming soon

// A new curiosity release coming soon //

Next month I’ll be releasing an album of curiosities titled Sharawadji. The album presents a fusion of Somadelia, Juju Space Jazz, Sahelian Generative, Nordic Throb and Post-Tribal Bliss (yes, existing genres have become rather inadequate to describe current musics ). Recorded and crafted in various locations over the years, the music paints an impression of the rhythms, melodies and sonic textures of its geographies: Lagos, Cotonou, Ouagadougou, Dakar, Fez, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Helsinki and Paris.

The release – which has also gone through titles like ‘Migrant’, ‘The Itinerant’, ‘Border Eraser’ and ‘Invisible Geographies’ – consists of outtakes from my forthcoming Interspaces and Earth Variations albums as well as from the previous Flash of the Spirit, Pulses/Radiance and Sahara albums – featuring also Noel Saizonou of Helsinki-Cotonou Ensemble on vocals and percussion. It’ll also include a previously unreleased track from LOS-HEL: Possible Cities, with a Lagos Soundscape by Emeka Ogboh.

As Interspaces and Earth Variations continue falling into place (or into space) slowly, delayed by me continuing to encounter new exciting musicians and possible collaborators here in Paris, I came to notice these outtakes together formed already a rather coherent and interesting whole: like a more colourful sibling or ancestor to the two albums-in-progress. More info to follow soon.

Spring Makes Noise: Paris

Update from Paris after a lengthy silence (you can follow my more frequent snapshots of Paris and abstract visual “musics” on Instagram @ilpojauhiainen).

Time flies, and the noise the spring keeps making is mostly inspiring: an exhilarating mix of new music, ideas, encounters, conversations, collaborations, doubts, dead ends, openings, failures, idiot glee, love as well as writing, reading, cycling, “working it harder, making it better”.

Currently I have four to five albums’ worth of material floating around – and every one of these compositions works rather well with everything else. For a while I was playing with the idea of releasing just one album: every time you’d play it, it would choose a different set of tracks from these 40+ compositions, depending on the first couple of tracks and the time of the day. A generative and modular record, in a way. But since it’s not financially possible to finish so many tracks – unless I have a record label backing me (finding a record label that’d understand the territory I’m cultivating has become next to impossible) – I’ve decided to focus on two albums only. Naturally this has presented a new challenge: which tracks to pursue further and to include on these records when everything seems to suggest a fertile new direction.

Both albums are inspired by the sort of global multiplicity and potential that we’re living in – creolization of ideas, if you will. Where Earth Variations I moves through denser geologies with more classical, traditional and experimental musical influences, Interspaces travels through more open landscapes and vistas, drawing from electronic, popular and possible musics; the keywords connecting their desired production criteria read “soulful”, ”purposeful” and “timeless”. Paris has influenced the music enormously, as have my friend’s abstract expressionistic paintings that she’s been creating here during the past year (soon to be shown in her solo exhibition in Helsinki): their vivacity, multilayeredness, delicateness, movement, rhythm and pulse, beauty and sensuality emerging from chaos, turbulence and randomness…have resulted in a kind of evolved richness, clarity and maturity in my music that I haven’t heard before. Both albums will be out in the fall.

Paris is also rather fitting a place to be working on these albums in: it was here that I first got the idea for this kind of “global” music (for lack of a better word) when I first came here as an adolescent in 1995. I was listening to these two Malian musicians on the Pont des Arts, one playing kora, the other electric guitar and singing. I had never heard such music before, and everything about that moment felt so novel and exciting, full of future potential: the electrifying West African sounds, midnight in Paris, being in a global metropolis, meeting these people from around the world, travelling across the continent…I realised I could never be happy making “just” electronic music, it had to have this feeling and texture of the world woven into it somehow.

The question always is how far to develop these compositions though. I can easily hear some electronic parts being replaced or accompanied by real string quartets, intercultural ensembles, gospel choirs…but this would require a whole different level of financial investment. The pioneering Finnish electronic duo Pan Sonic always used to say that what they’re actually making is Jamaican dub and American rock’n’roll, but since they are just two taciturn Finns with electronic oscillators, they leave all those dub and rock’n’roll elements out. In a similar way, I’m always working with orchestras and gospel choirs in mind but since I can’t afford them, I leave them out in the final mix.

The theatre/dance production we worked on during the winter is currently on hold due to the pandemic; the related short film has been finished and I’ll share it once it’s being released. My “futuristc jazz” album has been postponed for the future: it simply doesn’t feel so thrilling to me at the moment, compared to the new music that has emerged here. Some of the promising musical collaborations have led to nowhere. My bicycle broke down (now fixed). And Paris…Paris continues to be love, a home in this galaxy of ours.

Reimagine

Backstage at the closing ceremony of FESPACO film festival, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (2013). The rhythms and sonic textures these musicians were producing were out of this world, from some kind of deep ancient future. Naturally I was in heaven (and my recorder heavily in overdrive).

Currently I’m working on a truly exciting collaboration that enables me to revisit my experiences in West Africa and imagine possible futures – probably my most favourite creative activity ever. I’ll post more info on this later when it’ll become more actualised. This project has made me realise that we are probably drawn to and occupied by the same ideas and possibilities throughout our lives: my first memory of making music was when I was six years old and I was trying to imagine a possible African landscape after seeing a documentary about “a village somewhere in Africa”; I’d become tantalised by its atmosphere, scenery and soundtrack so much that I’d wanted to recreate that distant, another world with the electronic organ at our home. And here I am, doing exactly the same thing 37 years later.

But what is it about this particular idea that keeps occupying me?

It’s about redesigning our society, our politics, our economy. No more poverty, no more inequality, no more conflicts, no more ideologies (e.g. the outdated and unnecessary left-right politics). Just conscious, intelligent, healthy, long-term outcomes. We could easily live in a world where no one has to struggle for living, where everyone is taken care of, where people can enjoy living instead of having to earn living, where the nature and the humanity continue to flourish in balance, where the world lives in deep freedom (a concept by the economist and philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger – find out more here) – and where the prosperity and growth come from us thriving as conscious and active citizens of the world and not from us struggling as passive consumers tied to the unsustainable, elite-serving capitalist system. We only need to change our outdated political and economic systems – and music and the arts are already way ahead in this act of rethinking, reimagining and redesigning, waiting for the politics and economics to catch up.

This idea is equally about borders, nations, nationalism, tribalism, cultures, ethnicities and origins: inhabiting a possible world beyond and in between all the these arbitrarily maintained divisions; belonging to and being a citizen of Earth instead of any arbitrary nation. Cultures and differences are reasons for celebration and cooperation – harmonious disagreements – not for inharmonious disagreements, conflicts and walls. We humans are all different but equal, cohabiting this tiny planet equally with millions of other species: Earth is the shared home of everyone and everything. When you are making possible musics – multicultural, transcontinental, imaginary and hybrid – you are not actually trying to imagine a possible future, you are simply trying to show the actual reality amid all the ideologically constructed, artificially maintained divisions that we keep wasting our precious resources on.

My new album, meanwhile, will be out in mid June (it keeps evading all the titles and verbal descriptions, that’s why). Please, do stay safe and healthy X

Becoming World

An update on my forthcoming album, followed by a longer reflection on the present and the future.

Since I’ve been busy writing and finishing my thesis lately, it seems I have to postpone the release of my new “electro/Tokyo-meets-Dakar-meets-Arctic-meets-Sahel” album until early next year. The album would be ready for release in early December, but I always feel that the end of the year isn’t the most ideal time to put out new music, especially the kind that has more spring/summer vibe to it; and soon the release will be a thing of the last year and decade (at least in the eyes of the media), even though the music won’t become mainstream until perhaps 2040. 😉 And since some of the tracks were already started nearly 20 years ago but still manage to sound new, I think the record will sound fresh next year also. Or, I might be put out the (higher quality) Bandcamp version before Christmas, but the Spotify et al. release will have to wait till next year due to the delivery times.

This might be my last album (at least for a while) in terms of “traditional” electronic music with beats, basslines, chords, melodies, song structures…I feel I’ve been there and done that – unless some great collaborative project e.g. with some truly interesting singer emerges, which would bring a whole new purpose and dimension to producing music. But as far as my solo work with instrumental electronic “pop” goes, I’m done (and I couldn’t be happier to be exiting with this new album, because I think it’s the best I’ve done). Instead, I want to start going deeper into and continue exploring further the new musical landscapes and possibilities like those suggested by my another album-in-progress, Earth Variations, which moves somewhere between (the ever-blurring categories of) world music, possible music, contemporary composition and sonic art. It’ll be more experimental and, unfortunately, even less popular than my current output, despite (or perhaps because of) it retaining the human and emotive warmth, soul, at its core. Some of that exploration will probably find its natural platform also in Aihio, my duo with Petteri Mäkiniemi.

Besides the natural curiosity, another catalyst for this wanting to go musically and sonically somewhere new and exciting has been the process of writing my thesis, which explores generative music, site-specific sound and interdisciplinary art through the philosophy of becoming: to my surprise, the last six months of writing it became the most exhilarating mental journey I’ve ever taken! Especially the reading and pondering of the philosophy (Deleuze), and having the opportunity to apply it creatively to the ideas about music and sound, took me to places that I probably would have never reached otherwise; it also reconnected me with my passion for writing (I’ve been trying to get back to it for decades but music has always won – until now). After finishing the process, music-making suddenly seemed…ordinary, routine, creatively and conceptually rather one-dimensional.

The composer John Cage said that making music is a form of philosophy, a way to think about, understand and be in this world. I have always felt that way too. For example, songs like Prince’s When Doves Cry, Donna Summer’s State of Independence, David Bowie’s Heroes, Talking Heads’ Born Under Punches, Velvet Underground’s Run Run Run, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, Fela Kuti’s Alu Jon Jonki Jon, Björk’s Jóga, Brian Eno’s By This River, and so on, are not just great pieces of pop music/art, they are (to me) entire cosmologies, studies of the fundamental aspects of existence – not in any lyrical but more dynamic, spatial and sonic sense, in the relations and spaces between the sounds they contain. And I’ve approached my own music-making similarly, it has always been more concerned with the world than the capitalist demand for fresh product.

And this has led to my growing discontent with having to operate within the music industry in general. Whereas my favourite field, architecture, considers the whole world – politics, economy, society and culture – and operates simultaneously as a creative, intellectual, practical and academic practice, the field of music is mostly concerned with hype, ego, instagrammability, showmanship, the amount of social media “likes” and Spotify listeners – all so very unimportant, uninteresting and ephemeral things, in my view. There’s no room or need for discussions, ideas, thinking. Perhaps in the 1970s and 80s it was more common that an artist’s album release was accompanied by a broader cultural and philosophical discussion among the press and audiences about the work’s function and ideas (or maybe I’ve read too many interviews of Brian Eno from that time), but now it seems like music is treated as a mere supplementary and forgettable decoration, a by-product of a larger entertainment manufacturing, an indifferent stream of background data which you skim for few seconds before skipping to the next stream. The dichotomy between the (inner) world that surrounds and goes into the making of a piece of music and the (outer) world that receives it is often enormous – it’s almost like someone solved the theory of everything which would then be used to advertise a can of baked beans at the local supermarket only.

Well, I don’t actually blame audiences for wanting to use music as an escapist entertainment only, in the current world of global problems and political balderdash – and there’s simply too much music out there for any of it to receive proper attention – although I’ve always maintained that instead of escape, music actually takes us even more towards and within the reality, closer to the dynamic nature of existence and its inexhaustible potential (that philosophical function of music again). Perhaps music and art are moments of reality amid our ideological aberrations of political power games and free market religiosity?

Having had my senses arisen by the philosophical adventure and yet made even more unquiet by the dichotomy between my interests and the overall function of music, I’ll continue exploring this new musical (’possible musical’?) direction with great curiosity. I’ve always found myself occupying the spaces between things – be they research fields, art forms, cultures, continents, accepted musical genres – and it’s time I fully embrace this liminal condition and start cultivating its seemingly less crowded and less saturated terrain.

Thank you for reading, I really appreciate that!

Warmth X

Cover image: “Between architecture, music and environment – composing Future Forest Space in Neerpelt, Belgium, 2017”. Photo by Rachel Mrosek

composer / sound artist / writer