July 2017
I felt an immediate connection to the birch trees surrounding me when I started on my project at Arteles Creative Center in Finland. The title of this work, Koivu, is the Finnish word for birch, and the piece is constructed of several elements: 1. field recordings made around Arteles and within a 10-minute walk, including birdsong, wind in the trees, footsteps, cars on the road, and other incidental sounds, 2. spoken excerpts from an adaptation of an old English translation of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and 3. piano/rhodes solos plus other added MIDI instruments. All of the references from the Kalevala concern either birches specifically or trees more generally, and the mood changes from sweetness and light to darkness and hunger, ultimately to a sort of bittersweet resolution. My previous work has largely been in a different medium, so my time at Arteles was instrumental in helping me build tools for working with found sound/soundscapes, processing and combining those sounds with recorded improvisations, as well as giving me important experience in editing and mixing on a new software platform. The end result is a work that is primarily a form of storytelling – not so much of the Kalevala itself as of my time in Finland, my experience of the landscape around Arteles, and my relationship with the plants and animals of this place.
You can listen to the unmastered final mix below:
I felt an immediate connection to the birch trees surrounding me when I started on my project at Arteles Creative Center in Finland. The title of this work, Koivu, is the Finnish word for birch, and the piece is constructed of several elements: 1. field recordings made around Arteles and within a 10-minute walk, including birdsong, wind in the trees, footsteps, cars on the road, and other incidental sounds, 2. spoken excerpts from an adaptation of an old English translation of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and 3. piano/rhodes solos plus other added MIDI instruments. All of the references from the Kalevala concern either birches specifically or trees more generally, and the mood changes from sweetness and light to darkness and hunger, ultimately to a sort of bittersweet resolution. My previous work has largely been in a different medium, so my time at Arteles was instrumental in helping me build tools for working with found sound/soundscapes, processing and combining those sounds with recorded improvisations, as well as giving me important experience in editing and mixing on a new software platform. The end result is a work that is primarily a form of storytelling – not so much of the Kalevala itself as of my time in Finland, my experience of the landscape around Arteles, and my relationship with the plants and animals of this place.
You can listen to the unmastered final mix below: