(seepings) (2017)
Bass Flute, Bass Clarinet, Harp, Piano + Sampler, Cello
Duration: 14′
Commissioned by defunensemble (with support from the Sibelius Fund)
Fp. defunensemble, WHS Teatteri Union, Helsinki (Finland), 2 December 2017

The live [bootleg] recording below is from defunensemble’s world premiere of the work on 2 December 2017.

Hanna Kinnunen, bass flute
Mikko Raasakka, bass clarinet
Lily-Marlene Puusepp, harp
Emil Holmström, piano + sampler
Markus Hohti, ‘cello
Timo Kurkikangas, electronics

(in case the player above is not working, click here to go hear the music for free over at SoundCloud.com, using your browser.)
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(seepings) is a piece about integratation, about belonging, about and within the lived materiality of recorded music.

dedicated to (and commissioned by) defunensemble.

© 2017 Jarkko Hartikainen

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(seepings) (2017) for ensemble and sampler
commissioned and premiered by, and dedicated to, defunensemble (Helsinki, Finland, EU)

Since I identify as a huge music nerd with an actively hypersensitive brain regarding sonic phenomena, associations to existing music often disrupt my creative work that strives for freshness and new contexts in a concentrated acoustic listening environment. In (seepings) (2017), which began as an inquiry into finding a personal relationship with ‘the electroacoustic’, I let disrupting flashbacks of certain unescapable influences from the past seep through the score paper* rather concretely – using ‘their’ instrument, the loudspeaker.  (*The sound-emitting part in a loudspeaker, the cone, is often also made of paper that is made of wood like many instruments, if not of metal like strings or flute or electrical wires, or carbon-based like all the insulating plastic/oil that is protecting our bodies from the harmful effects of electricity, eg. shocks.)

From a half-second of recorded music, the human brain is typically capable of recognizing only the genre and the decade of the music (if even that), according to scientific studies in mental chronometry. This is naturally relative to the listener’s personal experiences with music(s), yet there exists a certain biological hard limit where we are able to listen to specific sounds with utmost concentration yet can’t recognize them as individual artistic expressions but rather as representations of larger musico-cultural contexts.

We may even repeatedly misrecognize the agency behind a short enough audio snippet with someone else using the same instruments, technology, etc. Then again, a shared pitch or chord (or a compositional logic that makes several very short impulses form one melody or scale) may make otherwise unrelated samples appear as an original work of a third party. I have studied the complexity and the edges of this psychological phenomenon with deliberate artistic research into the materiality of short samples of certain personally influential musical sounds: how they react to each other in different durations, proximities, and compositions in general.

© 2018 Jarkko Hartikainen