#saariselka

[nofatclips]

An extended version of Horizons by Saariselka, live at Land and Sea in Oakland

[junk-drop]

📍 Saariselkä

Northern Lights Village

[staceybombacey]

Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort - Saariselka, Finland

[bluecatsbookbug]

Finland, you will be missed. 2019 💙

[thesunlounge]

Saariselka - Into the Wind (from The Ground Our Sky, Temporary Residence Ltd. 2019)

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Saariselka - The Ground Our Sky

An absolutely perfect collab between Marielle Jakobsons (Fender Rhodes, organ, synthesizers) and Chuck Johnson (pedal steel guitar and treatments) that delivers on the promise of their recent Longform Editions contribution -- and then some! The Ground Our Sky is a spacial/glacial trip, with Jakobsons’ Terry Riley-esque keyboards melding magnificently with Johnson’s solar flare pedal steel. Mostly instrumental, but the two vocal pieces are great, too — Jakobsons’ goth-y turn on “Into The Wind” makes me think of Kendra Smith, while “The Void” is a gorgeous slo-mo pop song that suggests that sometimes when you stare into the abyss, the abyss smiles back. 

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Saariselka

The Oakland-based duo Saariselka sees composers Marielle Jakobsons and Chuck Johnson teaming up to make beautifully pastoral ambient Americana, which Dusted’s Ian Mathers described in a review of their debut album The Ground Our Sky as having “Jakobsons’ Fender Rhodes and synthesizers melding and bending with Johnson’s pedal steel until they seem like opposite sides of the same ribbon.” Just as both halves of the duo aren’t strangers to Dusted in general, they’re also not strangers to our Listed format, with Jakobsons contributing back in 2016. Now at the end of 2019 they’re back with a list of composers who treat sound as material, something close to their hearts as listeners of The Ground Our Sky can attest.

Composers who treat sound as material.

How do we feel sound? Besides shaping the emotional realm, composers can approach the materiality of sound itself in a lot of different ways. From recorded objects or musique concréte, instruments extended through technology, architecture and spatial installations, conceptual art, or the physics of sound and tuning.

Éliane Radigue—Occam Ocean Volume 2 (Chuck)

My first encounters with Éliane Radigue’s electronic music inspired me many years ago to dive deeply into electronics, modular synthesis, and the potential of long-duration sounds. When you enter her sonic world, sounds that may seem on the surface to be static reveal continuous change and movement. When I learned that she had shifted into composing for acoustic instruments I had a hard time imagining how her aesthetic would translate. Then I heard cellist Charles Curtis perform Radigue’s piece for solo cello, Naldjorlak, and it suddenly made sense. Sounds I had never heard before came out of his instrument, as if the inherent instability and alive-ness of the wood and strings had been called out of dormancy.

Pauline Oliveros (Marielle)—“A Woman Sees How the World Goes with No Eyes” / “A Love Song”

Chuck and I were both at Mills College studying with Pauline Oliveros at different times. Personally her embodiment of sound, her broad definition of “composition” helped me release a lot of baggage around my traditional conservatory training and what it meant to be a composer (it doesn’t mean you need to write notes on a page!). She was a pioneer and an activist, always pushing boundaries and comfort.

Catherine Christer Hennix—“The Well-tuned Marimba” (Chuck)

My interest in just intonation—methods of tuning that are based on the mathematics of natural harmonics rather than the equal steps of Western tuning—led me to Hennix. Of all the minimalists of her generation, Hennix may be the most mathematical in approach (she has taught mathematics and computer science at MIT and SUNY) but her music for re-tuned, electrified instruments has an organic and chaotic quality.

Morton Feldman—“Palais de Mari” (Marielle)

What if a composition exists on its own, as its own entity, with its own shape, in its own dimension, until you perform or listen to it? Our action itself pulls the compositional form of the work into this time and space, into our experience.

Arvo Pärt—Fratres for Eight Cellos (Chuck)

Although most of Arvo Pärt’s music is beautifully melodic and composed for acoustic instruments, his harmonic language—which he calls tintinnabuli—is inspired by the clangorous and resonant sound of bells. The results are deeply moving and celestial, but inside the harmonies of his classic works are blocks of sound that follow rigid compositional rules. And nothing has more of a “block of sound,” concrete quality than Pärt’s music performed by eight cellos!

[superbnature]

Sky on fire by kazmierczyk https://ift.tt/2GeFSbp