Marja Ahti is a Swedish artist living in Turku, Finland. She works with found sounds, objects and electronics, creating auditory assemblages that reveal a profound sensitivity to sound’s tactile potential. This new record sees her palette expand to include more recognisable acoustic instrumentation, albeit working in collaboration with musicians who are already reconfiguring how those instruments can sound.
Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth has its roots in a tape piece presented at Lampo in Chicago. Ahti then started working with Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet), Ryan Packard (percussion) and My Hellgren (cello) at the electronic music studios (EMS) in Stockholm. Incorporating recordings from those sessions, Ahti presented a new iteration of the work at the Seventh Edition Festival for Other Music in February 2024 with the trio performing live on stage whilst Ahti helmed the mixing desk, spatialising a specially made tape part through the INA GRM’s Acousmonium speaker orchestra. The piece has since gone through several further iterations before arriving at the version we have here on the LPs B-Side where immense bass pressure and high frequency tones buffer restless amplified breath and scrape that folds over itself with extraordinary dynamics and subterranean activity before giving way to gorgeous resonant forms and passages of ritual purpose and sheer, unmistakeable beauty.
The A-Side is Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth’s gentle double. Still Life with Poppies, Mirror and Two Clouds offers a companion reconfiguration of Ahti’s resynthesised percussion sustain and the same recordings of Hedtjärn and Hellgren from EMS, but here they’re nestled in a sonic landscape of calm and restraint that gives them a wholly other character. Ahti also draws on older recordings she’d made of Sholto Dobie’s diy pipe organs and uses these to create repeating patterns and flourishes of sliding pitches that emerge unexpected out of cycling passages of Ahti’s clear struck metal, destabilising electronic interventions and minimal piano figures.
Marja Ahti:
“I’ve been fascinated with the kind of elemental quality the sounds I'm using have such as airy sounds or earthy, wooden sounds. These qualities can also be found in wind instruments and percussion and the musicians I worked with on Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth are really good at enhancing these qualities in their playing. I wanted to have this connection between found sounds, field recordings, or pre-recorded sounds, objects, and material, and see where these sounds might meet each other, and hopefully blend is a natural way without a divide between instrumental music, or acoustic music, or electronic music.
But also, when you bring in people they come with their personalities and their ideas which is also energizing and brings surprising things into the collaboration that I couldn't come up with myself. I was really interested in making this a proper collaboration and not just coming up with the piece and giving it to them. We had the sessions at EMS where we could share ideas and Isak, Ryan and My could bring in their own ideas. Making recordings there gave me time to process these ideas and to also approach them in the same way that I would work with any other sound.”
Credits
Marja Ahti: electronics, field recordings, idiophones, amplified objects, piano, bass harmonica
Isak Hedtjärn: clarinets
My Hellgren: cello
Ryan Packard: percussion
Composed, mixed and recorded by Marja Ahti. Mastered and cut by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich. Artwork by Maija Luutonen. Layout by John Chantler.
Distribution
Discreet Music (SE)
ANOST (DE)
Clandestine (USA)
Soundohm (IT)
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, Finland. She is active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti, in the artist/organizer collective Himera and in collaborative projects with Judith Hamann, John McCowen, Manja Ristić and Mikko Kuorinki.
Isak Hedtjärn plays the clarinet — a straight, metal variant of the more common wooden B flat Clarinet.
A polymath of undeniable musicality, Isak is a constant, always invigorating presence across a breadth of ‘scenes’ in Stockholm be it via in his own groups — Grismask, Svenska Folkjazzkvartetten, Festen — or making guest appearances in concert and on record with Viagra Boys, Fire! Orchestra, Rotem Geffen, Kali Malone and many many more.
His online notoriety as @JazzIsak, the deft editor of a stream of classic jazz and tiktok dance/crash mashups is not only a riotous good time but gives you some other small window into the scope and scale of his knowledge of and feeling for all the music that has gone before.
My Hellgren lives in Göteborg, Sweden, and works as a cellist in many different contexts. She is mostly active in the scene of contemporary music and is a member of GAHLMM, Curious chamber players and Mimitabu.
My likes to work close with composers and has premiered solo and chamber music pieces.
My is educated at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen and at the Academy of music and drama at the university of Gothenburg.
Ryan Packard is a percussionist, composer and sound artist currently based in Stockholm, SE. His compositional language is concerned with intimacy, interdependence and sympathetic relationships.
His sound installations have been featured at the MCA Chicago, Lumen Project Stockholm, Fuji Textile Week Japan, Graham Foundation, Defibrillator, Hyde Park Arts Center, Galeria Labirynt, High Concept Labs, Constellation Chicago, Norberg Festival and Experimental Sound Studio. He has collaborated with artists like Nelly Agassi, Dave Rempis, Ben LaMar Gay, Brandon Lopez, Okkyung Lee, Will Guthrie, Nate Wooley, Peter Ablinger, Julio Estrada, Annea Lockwood, Magnus Granberg, John McCowen, Seth Parker Woods among many others.
He’s a member of the new music ensemble, Fonema Consort and has performed with Ensemble Dal Niente, Norrlandsoperan, Ensemble Nist Nah, Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society, tya ensemble, MOCREP, a.pe.ri.od.ic ensemble, NYC experimental rock group Skeleton$ and Architek Percussion Quartet.
Some of his current projects are Kommun, Kyosaku, ZRL and the Chicago minimal free jazz quartet, RedGreenBlue. He has released on American Dreams Records, Astral Spirits, Dinzu Artefacts, Thanatosis, Insub, Fönstret Edition Festival Records, Shinkoyo, Amalgam and No Index. Ryan has a masters of music from McGill University and bachelor of music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.