Viktoriia Vitrenko

Earth Variations out now

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

Earth Variations on Bandcamp

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

World / Interspaces

‘World’, featuring soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko on additional vocals, from the album Interspaces. The main vocal is by Taina Grohmann, quite heavily timestretched here, and it’s an outtake from my debut album Shimmer & Bloom (2011). The video consists of photographs taken by me in Tokyo, Marrakesh, Fes, Cotonou, Agouegan and Helsinki.

What makes this track really special to me is that it became, unintentionally, a condensation of my most cherished musical awakenings: from Can to Fela Kuti, Bernard Parmegiani to Steve Reich, Brian Eno to Björk, Jon Hassell to Pan Sonic, etc. to etc., it seems to have distilled ingredients from all these influences into its own kind of worldly essence. Especially four pivotal discoveries come to mind: ‘Boat-Woman-Song’ by Holger Czukay and Rolf Dammers (from their 1969 album Canaxis), ‘Come Out’ by Steve Reich (1966; it was preceded by a similar tape piece It’s Gonna Rain but Come Out was my first encounter with Reich), ‘Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics’ by Jon Hassell / Brian Eno (1980), and ‘Kokoku’ by Laurie Anderson (from her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak).

It’s also fascinating to notice that we indeed seem to be occupied by the same few ideas throughout our lives, exploring and cultivating them as we go along: when visiting Finland this summer and listening through my old tape archive (what’s left of it anyway: I have foolishly discarded most of my early demo cassettes), I was amused to realise that several of the tracks I’d made 30 years ago bore a distant similarity to pieces like World. While obviously exuding more naivety and my attempt to follow the musical trends of the time (like Balearic and ambient house), their shortcomings hinted at a desire to break free and create stylistically something more diverse and global; I was a teenager dreaming of a better world as well as exploring more of this world. And a couple of those pieces actually got played on the Finnish national radio (Radiomafia) where the presenters described them as “very interesting and original” at the time: the memory of having such an experimental mainstream radio culture now feels like a dream from a fictitious world, with any differing colour and sparkle (and any sign of a more complex and potential world) having been quashed decades ago by the monotonous industry playlists of hyper-consumerism.

But despite late capitalism’s best efforts, life continues to flourish and diversify – like in the basement rehearsal space of the Cité international artist residency, where I was fortunate to encounter the Ukrainian soprano, conductor and artistic director Viktoriia Vitrenko. When we were later recording her vocals and I sat there listening to her experiment (“the voice transports you: our small studio space turns into a concert hall, then into an Afromontane forest between a desert and an ocean, before returning, via the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Jonquet district of Cotonou, to a wooden cabin by a lake, with the stars just appearing in the late summer sky and the moonlight traversing the water’s still surface”), I felt a new musical awakening, a possible music waiting to be unearthed beyond the albums of mine we were working on – except this time, instead of records and radio waves I was in the same room where the music was coming into being. To experience such an unguarded moment of openness and play, when things break free and your preconceived ideas fail and become receptive to the environment – a molar world becoming molecular, a difference in the atmosphere becoming sensible yet still indeterminable – is what philosopher Gilles Deleuze might have described as being “present at the dawn of the world”.

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.

—-

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

Our Last Night at the Cité

Viktoriia Vitrenko and me, on our last night at the Cité. Viktoriia is a soprano, conductor and artistic director from Ukraine. We recorded and performed together during this residency which itself was a journey, a discovery and a transformation. More info on her work here.

The albums we worked on, Earth Variations and Interspaces, will both be out early next year (meanwhile, my album Sharawadji is scheduled to come out this month, permitting that my fantastic mastering engineer will recover from his unfortunate Covid infection – wishing him the best recovery and health!). Earth Variations will also include an edited segment of our 20-minute live performance here at the Cité: our ‘Soirée d’ambient finlandais’ concert last week was largely improvised, and it produced some rather novel musical atmospheres and landscapes, all happily captured for future purposes. A segment of the performance will also be broadcast in the forthcoming episode of the LOVI ambient radio show (more info closer to the airing).

Now, toward new adventures and worlds, with our paths hopefully meeting soon again. À bientôt !