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A long time ago I saw a film… dreamy, weird… To be honest I can’t remember a lot about it. I think at one point I fell asleep. But somehow I remembered the title when designing my new busking flyers.

City is the main instrument of a busker. But like any instrument, it can be in or out of tune. If the architecture allows, a good busker can make the whole street resonate beautifully. This doesn’t mean they should be raising earthquakes. In fact, loud amps or drums usually just add tension to the city ambience… (Just couple of days ago I had to quit busking when an African ensemble started banging their drums 300 meters away from me. This time I was fine with it — they put up a good show with dancers and a lot of people enjoyed it — but there are some buskers who don’t realize how much acoustic space they claim for themselves.)

I see busking as a way to “retune” the city ambience. Retuning doesn’t happen by competing with its noises, but rather by playing together with them.

I wrote earlier I’m working on a loop piece. It started as an explaration of a new concept of minimalism I have been thinking for a while.

Minimalism feels often like gold paint — a thin surface which says nothing but: “I can afford this”. It is a style that justifies consumerism by making it look almost spiritual.

On the other hand, minimalism still has its point. We live in an abundance of things and yet people crave for more. A powerful minimalist expression is capable of showing that we don’t need so much to feel whole.

Another point is that achieving a perfect white canvas has become easier because in most cases all you need to do is to press cmd+n. Digital nothingness is not rich, it’s disturbing. A white painting has shades. A silence recorded with a microphone sounds like silence, while digitally generated silence is perfectly nothing.

One of the strategies that I have used when fighting clinical silence in my audio works is adding subtle noise to my recordings. Sometimes I have composed the noise with synths, sometimes I have recorded it from tapes or vinyl records, broken cables or by micing broken speakers. To achieve a more realistic “silent canvas” I have had to compose the silence behind all sounds.

Next step is to incorporate the “imperfection of silence” in my live expression. Which means that I don’t have to produce it separately from the rest of my expression.

I have never really been a blogger, but maybe I have done it wrong, taking it too seriously, pretending to be a poet of some sort… Fuck poetry. I’ll start sharing updates about my work more frequently. Because I think it’s good to share the invisible part of my artistic job. Good for who? I don’t know. But here we go!

These are interesting times! I’m working on two new sound installations. One will be an acousmatic loop piece and one will be acoustic, which continues the path that I stepped on with In Girum Imus Nocte. And I just got an opportunity to record my next Kumea Sound album in August!

Feeling inspired!