Tag: sound art

  • Kumea WOOD shown in art exhibition & Labyrinthine dreams

    Art is weird. Strange things happen. Some weeks ago an friend of mine, artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri, asked if he could include my Kumea Wood USB drive in his sound art exhibition, “Sound of Work”. My release would serve as a part of a reference collection of silent sound works.

    Why not, I thought, and there it is: my Kumea Sound discography on a USB drive, hanging on the wall of Akusmata sound gallery. You can read more about the exhibition here.

    There is something cool about showing a small tech-filled piece wood in a gallery. It is easy to think that it is in a wrong place as it was never meant to be shown as a piece of art. But think of it as a conceptual reference and suddenly you start asking questions about sound archives, recording formats etc.

    I don’t want to overanalyze it, but I’m glad it’s there. Go see it if you’re in Helsinki!

    —

    For the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about a dream I had, in which I had released a gigantic album, consisting of at least 20 records and over 200 songs. This made me think why don’t we have extremely long pop records… Sandinista! by The Clash is 144 minutes long. Shaking The Habitual by The Knife is little less than a hundred. But where are all the 300 minute long albums? Max Richter’s Sleep is over 8 hours, which is actually quite good.

    Brian Eno released some generative music apps, including his latest immensely beautiful Reflection, which lasts as long as your phone battery does. But I don’t count generative music app as a recording.

    And then there is, of course, John Cage’s “As Slow As Possible” that lasts 639 years. Performance is happening now in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, and will end in 2640. You’ve got plenty of time to catch a note or two of it.

  • Vuorikaiku — a new sound gallery in Helsinki

    Vuorikaiku — a new sound gallery in Helsinki

    The last two months I’ve been busy with a project that I’m very excited about. As an artist focused on sound, I have always hoped that someone would start a simple sound/listening gallery in Helsinki. In March 2014 I will open Vuorikaiku in Arabianranta.

    Some contemporary art galleries here do exhibit sound works every now and then. Couple of years ago Petri Kuljuntausta opened his Akusmata in Töölö and Muu Gallery even runs a series of sound art compilation CDs, but I think there is still space for a more listening oriented galleries in Helsinki.

    What I wanted to do differently, is to create a sound gallery where focus will be only on sound — not on the context, artistic background or technical aspects. Just a plain room with four speakers and somewhere to sit down. In fact, it isn’t even as much about sound art than it is about listening.

    Of course, the exhibited works have their own artistic content, but in Vuorikaiku the audience doesn’t need any prerequisite information about sound art. In fact, works with complicated conceptual layers won’t be exhibited unless their actual sonic qualities are interesting enough. The gallery aims to open the ears and silence the conceptual mind.

    I will be sharing more information about the gallery and the exhibitions at Vuorikaiku blog. You may also like Vuorikaiku at Facebook.

    More to come soon! Keep your eyes — and more importantly, EARS — open!

  • Back to the future

    Back to the future

    Since I was a kid I have been interested in different concepts of time (thanks to Robert Zemeckis). Even today questions like linear vs cyclic time or single vs multiple timelines are very central to my music. Yesterday I watched a documentary about the Antikythera mechanism and was reminded of the amazing possibilities of today’s technology in modeling multiple timelines.

    The Tuvans have a special way to think about time. While in the Western world it is common to think of future as being infront of of us, in the Tuvan worldview the future is behind us. So, instead of looking back to what I did last year, I could take a Tuvan look behind my shoulder to see what’s coming next.

    In 2013 I did one major project: the Kumea Sound album. It was a huge effort in trying to combine my street music to my background as an electronic musician. To be honest, I had probably too many ideas, but in the end I had an album ready that I’m happy with. That said, it does feel more like a beginning than an end-product.

    Probably my two favourite tracks of the album are Tantra and Frog’n’Bell. They both have a structure that is seemingly simple. They are looping, circular compositions that evolve hardly at all in terms of melody, rhythm or harmony. They twirl around same themes and only a few new elements are introduced throughout the tracks. What makes them special to me is how they combine a cyclic element with a linear element. Their structure seems free and defined at the same time.

    Some of Brian Eno’s classic ambient works are more cyclic than linear. William Basinski used tape loops, but added a linear dimension to the compositions by capturing their gradual decay process while playing them back. Would it be possible to add even more timelines? On a record, maybe, but what about during a live performance? What about sound installation?

    The Antikythera mechanism allowed the Greek to study multiple timelines of celestial objects in a single mechanical composition. With the machine it was possible to view circular timelines next to each other and observe their relation on a linear timeline. But psychological time is different. The logic of the heart is different. My ultimate aim is to combine the mathematical elegance of the Antikythera mechanism with the chaotic soul particles, not by fusing them into one singular object, but by letting them co-exist within a same space… I have some ideas what this could be in practice. You’ll see.

    Ok, back to work! I’ll announce some extremely interesting Helsinki-based sound art projects soon!