A wave. A pause. A sense of hesitancy, as if with each step briefly suspended in the air, alert. Not exactly holding your breath, not exactly moving on, just whatever takes place in between. How an almost weightless object up in the air eventually sails down to the ground in irregular motions, shadow licking the ground. Watching the watcher in the eye of a grey dove down on the pavement. An oceanic opening. A notion of the light of the projector that infuses the film with life. A blue screen. A red screen. A wave. [italics]

The past winter and spring, I have been working with tuned percussion and prepared 32-string kantele, tuning, making recordings and working them into an electroacoustic composition called Reluctant Gravity. The instrumental sounds are tied together with distinct recordings of objects and spaces associated with the elements – water, fire, air, earth and spirit – as well as analog and digital synthesis. The piece vacillates between the natural dynamics of struck and plucked sounds appearing and fading into silence, forming a slowly evolving melodic path, intersected with cloudlike synthetic events of sustained sound accumulating a space that can be inhabited and studied from the inside.

At Drifts my performance will be an electronic live version of the piece with pre-recorded samples of kantele and percussion, interfused with crisp electronic details, clouds of sustained sounds and close-up details of field-recorded sounds.

Bio

Marja Ahti (b. 1981, Luleå) is a Swedish-Finnish sound artist working in composition, installation and cross-disciplinary performance. Working with field recordings, sounds of everyday objects and materials, analog synthesis, digital processing and acoustic instrumentation she creates precise musical narratives with organically unfolding sequences of details and textures. Her patiently evolving electro-acoustic constructions suggest a poetic realm between the acousmatic and the documentaristic, between abstraction and the deeply familiar. Ahti is currently based in Turku.

marjaahti.com