Taike

Earth Variations – streaming everywhere

Pleased to announce that my new album Earth Variations is now available on all the major streaming services worldwide.

Links to the album on selected streaming platforms

I’m truly excited – and relieved – to finally have this album completely released and out in the world. It’s been years in the making, with unexpected detours and discoveries along the way.

I’m truly grateful to the brilliant artists and musicians who made this album possible: Viktoriia Vitrenko @viktoriiavitrenko on vocals and voice, Omar Harb @omarharbmusic on bass, Petteri Mäkiniemi @petterimakiniemi on Ginette, Nazim Bakour @nazimbakour on electric guitar, Em’kal Eyongakpa on field recordings. And to the brilliant Gregor Zemljic @gregor_zemljic_gz_mastering for mastering the album with such care.

Thank you also to the similarly brilliant Lee Clough @leeclough, whose original photograph (now obscured by my yellow haze) inspired both the visual and sonic direction of the album. And for her Indian riverscape tape recording that first set me off for unearthing these possible musical geographies (back in 2000!).

My gratitude and warmth also extend to everyone else whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet along this journey – there are simply too many of you to mention here 🙂 – as well as to the Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR) and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for their invaluable support. Thank you.

Keep rocking X
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“Earth Variations explores the idea of music as an embodied and possible geography: a milieu, landscape, terrain, situation, condition, atmosphere. It is inspired by our unique, complex planet in a state of flux. Featuring 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 London, Saarbrücken, Espoo, Douala and Paris between 2004 and 2023.”

Phew and gratitude

Spring makes noise!

Pleased to announce that my new album Earth Variations will finally be out on May 15. The initial Bandcamp release, with additional artwork and higher quality download, will arrive on all the other streaming platforms in early June.

The release has been delayed by my doctoral programme application, which has taken most of my spring. Excited to announce that I’ve finally been accepted to the prestigious and advanced Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium! Phew (and gratitude). For the next four years, I’ll be researching the future of music and developing a novel environmental AI application while enjoying some waffles and chocolate.

The mastering of the album has also taken longer than usual, since this one required “gardening, not architecture” (after Brian Eno): putting your gloves on and tending carefully the delicate textures and colours the album is made of. Yet I knew that my inimitable mastering engineer, Gregor Zemljic (at Earresistible Mastering), would be able to rise to the challenge, preserving the fragile, unique qualities of the original while enhancing them greatly. And he did!

Phew and gratitude.

These also extend to the Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR) for their two-year artist grant, and to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for their six-month artist grant, both which enable me to focus on my current stage of artistic research and production with the depth, immersion, time and care they require. Thank you, SKR and Taike. The future suddenly feels possible in its improbable brightness.

Keep redesigning the world. Stubbornly. 🙂

Marseille, France, 2021. One of the many places visited on the album.

Wonderland

An end of the year update.

Time flies, as do the ideas and potential creative directions enabled by the space and quiet of the writing residency. It’s been one of the most inspiring and productive periods ever, which will still continue for the coming spring until my next endeavours.

Early next year I’ll finally be able to start mastering the Earth Variations album, followed later by the Radiant City EP. They’ll be released in the spring and summer, respectively. Excited – and relieved!

Next year will also see the start of my major sonic art project that brings together science and art, thanks to the artist grant from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike). More about this in due course.

I’m also planning a collaboration with this Iranian santur master here in Jyväskylä in the spring. Having experienced a couple of his very moving live performances, we’ve been having inspiring conversations since, mixing music talk with those of world politics and philosophy: always a good sign. Instead of simply improvising (which I’d then have to painstakingly edit into coherent takes), he actually prefers to compose his parts beforehand – I’ve been hoping for this kind of dedication for most of my musical life! Ours will be a special EP, blending the sound of his 3000-year-old percussion-stringed instrument with my yet-to-be-finished Afromontane Sound Painter. Ancient meets futuristic.

I’m currently busy applying for a doctoral programme in this prestigious music academy in Europe. Out of over a hundred applicants, I’m pleased to say that I’m among the final four to be considered for this particular position. This is a huge honour in itself as the position would allow me to focus on an artistic research into the future of music as well as the role of composers/musicians in the future society. Fingers crossed.

My planned book (on the future society through sonic arts) has been trundling and instead diverging into a series of essays. In our monthly essay workshop here with local writers – all of them established and many with literary awards (contrast this with me) – I’ve been receiving the most unexpected feedback: so enthusiastic, constructive and critically supportive! These authors have enabled me to see my writing in a wider literary and cultural context and believe in the importance of what I’m trying to say as well as the literary style I’ve been developing. So: something new will be published in the future days.

Spotify sucks. Please, reconsider using the service if you care about music, the artists that create the music and a healthy economy that underpins any equal, productive and functioning society. Thank you. (in academic terms: SPOTIFY SUCKS. THEY ARE THIEVES AND CRIMINALS.)

Lately I’ve been making new music for various poetry readings here in Jyväskylä. This has been the most refreshing as the music is a reaction to the local culture and environment as well as the poetry in question, enabling one to approach the idea of music from often surprising perspectives. Waking up early in the wintry mornings when it’s still dark and quiet, working on a new composition while watching the light gradually dawn and reveal a landscape covered in snow and frost – an in-between state conspired by the poetry, the landscape and the emerging music where anything feels possible. It is a literal dawn of the world, a (winter) wonderland.

Have a warm and peaceful transition into the new year 🧡✨

Within a world containing bloom

A small update.

Currently enjoying my writing residency in Jyväskylä, Finland, enormously. This city of lakes and hills is known as the capital of Finnish hip hop; the Athens of Finland (“the cradle of the arts and sciences”, nowadays a major educational and cultural centre); the capital of the eminent Finnish architect Alvar Aalto; the City of Light (a global pioneer in innovative urban lighting). In the fall I’ll start performing city-sensitive ambient live sets in this local and legendary poetry club. The words are also sprouting: after writing solely in English for so many years, I suddenly discovered a whole new, rich and fertile, “exotic” landscape in the Finnish language.

I’ll be releasing a special EP of melodic beat-based electronica soon, with an album to follow later. It continues the thread of my debut album Shimmer & Bloom – including a previously unreleased track with poet Rick Holland – but with an added perspective and experience of 12 years. The tracks just continue to sound timeless (and beautiful!) year after year so I might as well make them timely now.

While visiting my childhood home over the Midsummer break, I brought my entire DAT (digital audio tape) archive with me, covering the years 1995-2008. It’s incredible how much novel, brilliant and releasable material there is when it’s no longer your younger, too critical and often insecure ears listening to it. Expect compilations like Proposals for Possible Musics: From Every Imaginable Genre to Every Other Imaginable and Unimaginable Genre + bonus Alternative Realities Mixes coming out soon.

Also, forgotten field recordings of Tokyo, London, Paris and a Finnish summer cottage: from African drumming in Yoyogi park and rainy evenings in a bustling/calm Shinjuku to a salmon being smoked over a lakefront fire and a wood stove sauna being prepared (via London drain pipes and a Parisian café where French, Japanese and English keep forming a new lingual blend).

(The classic ‘Black Egg’ is also here – whoa! – which used to cause serious headbanging when we played it live to an overcrowded audience at the sweaty basement of the now legendary but defunct Foundry bar in Hoxton, London, in 2001. Ours was the first band ever to play live in those old bank vaults, with a long queue extending up the stairs and through the bar above as the space could accommodate only so many. A definite highlight of my musical adventures!)

Next year I’ll start developing a new version of my Future Forest Space composition and sound installation – thanks to Taiteen edistämiskeskus (Arts Promotion Centre Finland) for their artist grant that enables me to continue this long-term project of mine. I’m truly grateful! The work addresses the use of AI and environment in music and sound art while developing a new kind of musical language through a more considerate application of these. The project will be realised in Switzerland, France and Finland together with various research institutions.

The album Radiant City is coming along slowly but well. I love exploring the idea of a city through the abstract energy and pulse of music while sonically revisiting the cities of my past travels. The album threatens to escape the city limits though and diversify into all kinds of directions and environments.

Earth Variations is now finished and waiting for a funding for its mastering. I wish the music industry was more like art world: valuing originality, ideas and content over popularity and familiarity.

Outside the narrow corridors of the industry, life and music continue to expand, diversify and flourish. And that’s all that matters in the long run. Have a beautiful summer! x