|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
BT 108LP
|
Black Truffle announces Tender Membranes, the label's first release from Swedish-Finnish sound artist and electro-acoustic composer Marja Ahti. Active for a decade in the Finnish underground music scene, in recent years Ahti has developed a distinctive approach to patiently unfolding electro-acoustic constructions, documented on a string of solo releases and collaborative projects with Judith Hamann and her husband Niko-Matti Ahti. Working with concrete and instrumental sounds, field recordings, and electronics, Ahti favours neither disjunctive collage nor monolithic consistency; rather, her work is composed of organically unfolding sequences of details and textures. Tender Membranes consists of four lengthy pieces, partly inspired by the image of the senses and mind as membranes allowing for the passage between inner and outer spaces, sensation and its causes, creating a world. Ahti's unhurried pacing encourages this sense of listening as an opening or surrender to sound, which can often create the impression that the listener is moving through a space zooming in on details. Like those of the masters of the French musique concrète tradition, Ahti's sounds are not often recognizable, though they might suggest proximity or distance, open environments or closed spaces, the urban or rural, day or night. What Ahti calls her "poetic way of experiencing and organizing the familiar and the unfamiliar" is sustained throughout Tender Membranes, but each piece has its own character. Arriving in a sleeve reproducing contemporary Finnish photographer Sini Pelkki's fragmented visions of the everyday, Tender Membranes is a balm to reawaken tired ears.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
SOD 127LP
|
Still Lives is the third solo full length by the Finnish composer Marja Ahti, following a pair of releases on the Hallow Ground imprint. As a collection, it may be seen as a series of studies on the liminality of the listening act and an investigation into the physicality of sound. Ahti forges vivid electroacoustic environments from field recordings, analog synthesizers, acoustic feedback, magnetic tape and digital processing, resulting in a set of articulate, prickly, and surprising compositions. In the artist's words, "These pieces could be conceived of as vanitas paintings of a kind -- selections of mundane or archetypal objects, sounds that have their own distinct qualities, but exist only by virtue of being temporary events. From another angle, one could think of them as shrines -- objects assembled and set in a particular relationship to each other, charging each other in their given constellations." Includes download code; edition of 300.
Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a musician and composer based in Turku, Finland. Originally from Sweden, Ahti has been a part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years in different constellations. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner and as a member of the Himera artist/organizer collective.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
HG 1901LP
|
Vegetal Negatives is a game of sonic mutations, mimicry, inversions, and association inspired by a text called "On pataphotograms", by the French writer René Daumal -- a quasi-metaphysical essay that toys with breaking the conceived separateness of natural forms through poetic imagination. Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-born artist living and working in Turku, Finland. She has been an active part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years, performing with Ahti & Ahti and under the moniker Tsembla. Now arriving at her debut LP under her own name, Ahti explores a new formal language and sonic palette that ventures far from the path of her earlier work. The four electroacoustic compositions on the album combine and arrange field recordings, electronic feedback, Buchla and ARP synthesizers, bowl gong and harmonium, textures of detailed acoustic sound, and sustained tones with gentle microtonal beating into a precise musical narrative. She juxtaposes recordings of rooms and empty vessels, natural and artificial climates, spontaneous and staged events. Ahti draws upon Annea Lockwood's ideas about associative movements between sounds based on shared characteristics and sonic energy. The sounds hover between abstraction and the deeply familiar, moving into a realm of poetic metaphor where they are set in relation to each other, fleetingly mirroring or shadow-dancing. Acoustic environments mutate into synthetically derived shadow forms.
|
|
|
|