Site-specific

PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA – afterthoughts

Thank you to everyone who came to visit my poetry-sound installation PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA (“small truths/facts”) at Taavettilan riihi in Jyväskylä this weekend. It was a delight to see so many visitors attending (despite the glorious summer weather outside), some even spending hours inside immersed in the experience.

The feedback I received from the audience was overtly positive, at times even rapturous which was all heart-warming (of course, people withhold any criticism they might have – I always wonder why is that?). People commended the way the voices, words and music kept emerging and unfolding in the space, creating an immersive, never-ending spatial and aural experience.

The adjective I kept hearing was that of ‘meditative’: this one author even called the installation as a kind of “meditative opera” (as in opera the narrative voice often forms the central musical element). From now on, I shall call my poetry installations as that: meditative operas. 🙂

Personally I’m very pleased with how the whole installation – poems, voices, music, their generative evolution and acoustic diffusion, architecture, environment, light etc. – turned out. Even though I’d already been listening to the piece for hours and hours while making it, I’d still find myself utterly immersed in it, captivated by how it kept producing novel combinations of its textual and sonic elements. Version 2.0 is already in the pipeline (upon request).

The space was lit by the natural light coming through the windows, and it only occurred to me during the exhibition that what an integral new layer that formed! As the piece kept unfolding within the space throughout the day, simultaneously the light kept softly changing, creating a generative experience of its own: at times it felt utterly magical.

Thank you to Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry and Villa Rana for making this possible. And thank you to Petri Turunen (from Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry) for initiating, curating and organising this project: your work was invaluable. And naturally, thank you to all the poets, whose words – spoken and written – kept inspiring me throughout the process (when my music continued failing): they made the piece the novelty and success it was.

My deepest gratitude. ❤️

Authors/poets Helmi Solimeïs, Riitta Cankoçak and Petri Turunen

New poetry installation in development

Taavettilan riihi. This is the oldest building in Jyväskylä, Finland – and the site of my next sound installation!

I really love working on site-specific installations: engaging in local conditions and creating a novel kind of work that exists between architecture, environment and music – and in this case, also poetry!

While this won’t be my first site-specific piece to use spoken word*, it’ll be the first one to focus primarily on poetry, drawing from texts and voices of contemporary local poets. And I couldn’t be more thrilled: after all, this is a city known as the capital of Finnish hip hop and the Athens of Finland – not to mention for its vibrant literary scene – celebrated for its inventive command of the language.

Instead of drifting in distant server clouds as music releases do (Earth Variations, how’s the world receiving you?!?), the music in site-specific pieces becomes rooted in real habitats, acquiring new spatial and social possibilities as well as responsibilities; it becomes locally meaningful and not just globally meaningless.

And any feedback you receive for your work comes from real living beings, not from marketing spam bots (as you mostly do online).

The installation will be presented during the opening weekend for the autumn season of the city of Jyväskylä’s Taidekatu (Art Street), September 6-8. More info in due course.

* My very first site-specific sound installation, Nordic Staircases at the Round Chapel in London in 2001, was based on a recording of a poem of mine, read in different Nordic languages and electronically treated to correspond with the acoustics of the chapel’s large staircase.

‘Undiscovered Planet’ – music for immersion

As we quieten for the holidays, here’s an outtake from the upcoming album Earth Variations.

‘Undiscovered Planet’ was originally a site-specific composition made for Vapaan Taiteen Tila in Helsinki (Free Arts Space, a cavernous bomb shelter under the Katri Vala park, now used as an event space for the students in the University of The Arts) where it formed part of my sound and light installation A Garden, Faraway (for Katri Vala)* for the Sounding: Underground sound art exhibition in November 2017. In the installation, the music was diffused through large ventilation pipes into two cavernous, warmly and colourfully lit corridors, but because of its subtle and discreet character and the relative loudness of the other works on show, the piece went largely undiscovered by most visitors; I had composed and mixed the music in situ in late evenings after everyone had gone home, sitting alone in those beautiful, calming and quiet caverns and observing how the music emanated gently from the pipes and interacted with the space in ever-shifting, delicate ways. It had felt perfect, and those evenings became the most elevating and immersive sound-space experience in my career to date. It’s a shame then that no one else got to experience the installation in its intended, original condition. 🙂

This new version includes – quietly in the background – a conversation between Emeka Ogboh and me, recorded in Emeka’s kitchen in Lagos in March 2013 and with an orchestra of crickets, generators and neighbours pulsating in the warm night outside. It’s one of those Lagos-Helsinki things…

Have a peaceful and immersive holiday, everyone!

* Katri Vala (1901–1944) was a progressive Finnish poet, critic, school teacher, and during the 1920s a central member of the literary group Tulenkantajat (the Fire Bearers). Their main slogan “windows open to Europe” resonated strongly with me and my friends growing up as kids in a small village in Finland, while Vala’s debut book Kaukainen puutarha (A Distant Garden) inspired me greatly as an adolescent to seek life beyond that offered by our cultural, economic and political realities at the time.