Spoken Word

PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA by Saga Elgland Company

Thank you to choreographer and dancer Saga Elgland (of Saga Elgland Company) for her brilliant performance of my sound-poetry composition PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA at Villa Rana, Jyväskylä FI, last night!

More info on the composition and its origins here.

Her “reactive dance house game” to my “meditative opera” appears to have been an inventive, immersive, captivating and elevating experience for the audience full of praise afterwards (based on the feedback I’ve received).

Watching the several clips I’ve so far received, it’s fascinating to observe whether the poetic and sonic content follows the performance or the other way around; and how the movements, gestures, acts and objects keep constantly acquiring and shifting between different meanings and interpretations, depending on the words and sounds emerging. The entire stage seems to exist in a state of constant becomings: endless virtual possibilities becoming actual in plain sight, a multitude of stories seamlessly flowing into one another and unfolding in parallel, suggesting unexpected realities.

Naturally, thank you to everyone who attended the performances – the audience becoming part of the stage design was an inspired choice! – as well as to the participating partners who made this collaboration possible: Keski-Suomen Tanssin Keskus ry, Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry and Kulttuuritalo Villa Rana.

The featured poets:

Olli-Pekka Tennilä
Suvi Valli
Kristian Blomberg
Riikka Simpura
Petri Turunen
Anniina Louhivuori
Niklas Salmi
Riitta Cankoçak
Vesa Lahti

My deepest gratitude X

*** Have a warm and wonderful holiday season ***

P.S. Here are three rough clips from one of the performances, recorded with a phone camera by one of the featured poets, Vesa Lahti.

Choreography and dance: Saga Elgland

Music and sound: Ilpo Jauhiainen

Light and stage design, technical realisation: Lasse Saari, Timo Hanhisalo, Toivo Niemi

Production: Keski-Suomen Tanssin Keskus ry in collaboration with Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry and Kulttuuritalo Villa Rana

Dancing about meditative opera: PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA at Villa Rana

My generative sound-poetry composition PIENIÄ TOSIASIOITA (2024) will be premiered as a contemporary dance piece at Villa Rana, Jyväskylä, next Friday 20 December, with two 60-minute performances (at 18h and 20h).

This “meditative opera” will be transformed into an embodied experience of movement and play by choreographer and dancer Saga Elgland.

Due to the generative nature of the piece, each performance will be unique, different.

I’m truly excited – and full of gratitude – as I always love working with contemporary dance, yet it happens so rarely! (seeing my friend’s contemporary dance piece in 1998 was the reason I went to study sonic arts in the first place)

More info and tickets below:

FB event

Villa Rana website

Tickets

Here in Ghent, I’m currently finalising a new, immersive 3D version of the piece for the performance. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the première myself as I’ll have a doctoral seminar here that day, but I hope some of you may get to experience the piece and the wonderful work that Saga and her team has put into it!

Supported by Keski-Suomen Tanssin Keskus ry, Keski-Suomen Kirjailijat ry, Kulttuuritalo Villa Rana.

Warmth X

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

Live at Vakiopaine

This Saturday I’ll be performing two live-sets at this legendary venue Vakiopaine and their similarly legendary poetry club SÄHKÖ in Jyväskylä. Come, if you find yourself in this Nordic City of Light!

This first club night of the autumn features poets Sanna Karlström, Hanna Syrjämäki and J.K. Ihalainen.

I’m excited and honored to perform together with Sanna Karlström. The multi-award-winning poet and author will be reading from her newest poetry collection Pehmeät kudokset (Otava 2022), for which I’ve created a completely new, site-specific composition that will be generated live (I refer to the musical style as “Terrestrial” – after Bruno Latour )

My solo set will include a similarly new composition, inspired by the urban condition of Jyväskylä. Expect afrorithmic cityscapes and futurhythmic environments: Terrestrial Afrorithm!

The entry is free. Welcome!

SEPTEMBER 2

Field recording. Creating sounds.

Discovering and amplifying sounds that are too fragile, ephemeral and indeterminate for the music-entertainment-industrial-complex.

There’s something a lot more gratifying in selecting and designing sounds in this way than sitting in front of a screen and clicking through thousands and thousands of the most dazzling, amazing, impressive ready-made sounds that the industry offers these days.

Music-making, here in the forest, becomes an adventure of discovery again, drawing/composing from life.

(The music will be returned to life next Saturday at Sähkö, this legendary poetry club with spoken word artists and experimental live music and sound art here in Jyväskylä … inadvertently, this new piece also became the basis for a major sonic art project that I’ll be embarking on next year! Never underestimate the potential of weak, transient and ambiguous elements, those unpromising beginnings…)

AUGUST 28

Autumn Leaves (2023).

“But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall…”

It must be that time of the year again, since one has to dig out their dataflow landscape designs and do some gardening before the next live set. Pure Data is like cycling: once you have learned how to flow with it, you just never forget how freeing it is!

AUGUST 13

The joy of developing new music for a forthcoming live-set, together with various spoken word artists (more info soon).

Knowing that the music will only exist in that brief moment of time and draw from a local culture and environment is hugely thrilling for me. I currently refer to the music as “city-sensitive afrorithmic soundscapes and futurhythmic environments”. I may need to clarify that a bit.

The image is based on a photo that I took ten years ago at a rural market on the border between Benin and Togo (last night the DJ at this party played an irresistible Afrobeat groove which turned out to be a track by Frankosun and the Family – one of my collaborators from Benin! I felt so happy for them).

composer / sound artist / writer