KRAFTVERK (2026)

Kraftverk, my piece of experimental music theatre, takes off from a correspondence between Jean Sibelius and his uncle Pehr in October 1888. The latter was a merchant, an amateur violinist and composer and an enthusiast of the natural sciences. He served as a father figure to the young Janne, who had lost his own father at the age of two.

Pehr passed on to Sibelius a report, published in a local newspaper, about a new source of power developed by the American John Keely: the intention was to convert the “etheric vapour” produced by musical instruments into electric current. Keely managed to raise funding equivalent to 95 million dollars in today’s money for his startup venture. (The “luminiferous ether” itself was, at the time, assumed by many physicists to be the medium of electromagnetic radiation. This hypothesis was only abandoned decades later, once Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity had been proven.)

Sibelius starts speculating on the suitability of musical vibrations as a power source for urban infrastructure. At the same time, he sketches a cluster chord capable of producing energy with maximal efficiency. Such chord could not be found anywhere else “except in my experimental music”. Sibelius also proves to be a pioneer of acoustic ecology as he ponders the effect of this sound on the environment: under the influence of “animal magnetism,” the inhabitants and animals of cities would, in the long run, become highly peculiar.

Kraftverk consists of an electroacoustic installation that recreates Sibelius’ peculiar chord and a melodrama for narrator, Jupiter 8 synthesizer and live artists. At a performance at National Library on 20 August 2026, Janne Kivistö performed with me while the 1 400 spectators were encouraged to move around within the installation and explore the effect of the vibrations on mind and body.

To enhance the experiential element, I devised a somatic exercise titled “Rite of animal magnetism”. Together with Naarmu Ensemble, a collective of amateur enthusiasts of experimental music and live art, we built the prerequisite masks in a two-day workshop led by visual artist Pauliina Turakka Purhonen and guided the audience into the anthropomorphic experience.

UMUU Quartet (ONGOING)

In 2011 I invited violinists Jukka Rantamäki and Pasi Eerikäinen and violist Pisku Ristiluoma to join me in performing Charles Ives’ 2nd String Quartet at the newly established Kallio New Music Days festival. Subsequently we recorded it for YLE Radio 1.

That first gathering has proved serendipitous, and over the years we’ve dived into and given rare performances of important 20th century repertoire, including:

Morton Feldman:
Piano and String Quartet (with Mirka Viitala)
Trio (with Jouko Laivuori)
Violin and String Quartet (with Mieko Kanno)

Charles Ives:
Chorale
String Quartet No.2

Juho Laitinen:
Sillalla
Strange changes

Alvin Lucier:
Fideliotrio (with Mirka Viitala)
Navigations
Tapper

Luigi Nono:
Fragmente–Stille, an Diotima

Wolfgang Rihm:
Musik für drei Streicher

Arnold Schoenberg:
String Trio

Christian Wolff:
Or 4 People
String Trio for Robert Ashley

Iannis Xenakis:
Ikhoor (with Matthias Funke)

I formulated a three-way process:

ACTION
any actions are permissible: explicit or implicit, large or small
sound, movement and image, for example
improvised or composed action or something in between

CONTEMPLATION
a quiet individual time shared with others
think, draw, make notes or simply rest

REFLECTION
a verbal sharing of what we’d just experienced

These three elements were used in different sequences to form three parts of the event. Each element had a duration of 10 minutes and each part lasted a half-hour, separated by intermissions. The transitions were signaled by a gong.

action – reflection – contemplation
contemplation – reflection – action
reflection – action – contemplation

Gold Dust Variations was performed at Kallio New Music Days on 17 January 2026 by members of the UMUU and Naarmu Ensembles as a coming-together of professional and amateur musicians. The event was a remarkable success: together with the ca. 30 people attending we whole-heartedly embraced the rules of the game. A delightfully multisensorial and pluralistic atmosphere during much of action alternated with spirited discussion and beautiful moments of shared repose.

The title of the piece is a nod to Karlheinz Stockhausen and his Goldstaub from Aus den sieben Tagen (1968). His proposal to fast for four days and then play individual sounds has intrigued me for a long time, even if I couldn’t subject myself or ask anyone else to perform it.

THE GREAT LEARNING (2020–2024)

Between 2020 and 2024 I directed an artistic research project built around a complete performance of Cornelius Cardew’s avant-garde music theatre work The Great Learning, with funding provided by Kone Foundation. This collaboration between Uniarts Helsinki and Tulkinnanvaraista forum gathered together some 2 900 participants in over 150 events.

The eponymous text by Confucius encourages personal and collective growth by way of sincere introspection, mutual compassion and striving for a restful and balanced stance “even when seeing a tiger eye-to-eye”. These principles were rigorously applied with two aims.

(1) To develop an experimental practice of rehearsing and performing experimental music. Theoretical, philosophical, psychological, social, ethical and societal aspects of the work are to be considered equally important as the practical making of music.

(2) To facilitate equal and inclusive opportunities for art-making and learning for a wide range of people, regardless of prior training or expertise.

The project resulted in performances of music, theatre and live art on a high artistic level. It also led to the formation of Naarmu Ensemble that stays active beyond the project. The pedagogical interests are continued in experimental music workshops at Uniarts that are open and free for all.

An extensive report (in Finnish) on the research can be found here.

“On the bridge” is a study of the friction between bow and string and the latent energy in the fermatas from which sound emerge.

Originally written for alto flute and cello in 2013 and subsequently arranged for cello and voice, in 2023 I made this electroacoustic version with the sounds of the string trio fed into a feedback loop of an ARP 2600 synthesizer.

LINES IN STATES OF EXPLOSION/IMPLOSION (2022)

I’ve been mesmerized by Euclid’s definition of line as one-dimensional and without width. In what way is it possible for a line to exist, then?

I took a close look at how lines had been drawn by Earle Brown in Four Systems, Nam June Paik while performing La Monte Young’s “draw a straight line and follow it”, Cornelius Cardew in Treatise, Phill Niblock in Descent, and many of Peter Ablinger’s works.

A hypothesis emerged: the one-dimensionality is a consequence of the line being either of a static (Parmenides: “nothing ever changes”) or dynamic (Heraclitus: “everything changes, all the time”) nature. Either reduced or simplified into an essence, or on the verge of exploding into entropy or imploding into singularity.

Looking for a visceral response to the question, I began to draw lines with pencil on paper. I noted a similarity between that instrument and drawing a bow across a string, and was fascinated by the friction between the roughness of the paper and the tool. I became aware of the natural discontinuity in these lines, and of sustained sound as a beautiful illusion we project onto discreet musical events, creating melodies and other kinds of “lines”.

I made a drawing of 16 ascending or descending lines and used it as a score to signify frequency changes over duration. The ambitus of the pitches would range from 44 to 13 000 Hertz, the duration was set to be 32 minutes. I then recorded these gestures on a Minimoog synthesizer, learning to very slowly manipulate the oscillator pitch control (sometimes at a pace of 1 Hertz over 6 minutes).

Among the fundamental parameters of music, tuning holds a particular interest for me. I see it as an important pathway to connect the tactility of music-making with the theoretical and contemplative organism of sound.

I believe that accurate tuning is a ”function of time”, as La Monte Young postulates. Letting go of the desire of making the music swiftly move forward, one can immerse in a deep listening and take into account the whole resonant spectrum of fundamental pitches, common overtones and subharmonic difference tones. Simultaneously, an act of tuning-in occurs: a psychophysical engaging with the sonorous network that is a basis for all of our music.

In about 2008 I became interested in Just Intonation, the system where pitches correspond to relations of integer numbers. I was mesmerized by these exquisitely beautiful and mysterious sounds that were different from everything else I had heard before. I initiated my studies with a commission from Juhani Nuorvala, the foremost Finnish JI composer. The later publication of Boost for cello and monophonic synthesizer by Fennica Gehrman includes an introductory tuning guide I wrote to facilitate the learning of this music for non-specialists.

MUSIC WALK (2020–2023)

During Covid-19 I formulated a concept for an event with threefold aims: to gain health benefit from spending time in the nature; to enjoy a light exercising together; and to study how to make an event where everyday and artistic reality overlap. On three occasions we gathered for curated and impromptu performances and walking, talking, listening, eating and resting together.

The first event took place on 21 November 2020 in Luukki forest. During the a six-kilometer walk we witnessed performances by Mikko Hassinen, Nanna Ikonen, Minerva Juolahti, Juho Laitinen, Juhani Räisänen, Tuukka Tervo, Viktor Toikkanen and Timo Tuhkanen until settling on a hill to eat, rest and perform – all of us together – Howard Skempton’s Drum No.1.

The second walk on 25 July 2022 stretched over 14 kilometers from Suomenoja to Lauttasaari along the coastal walkway. Hosted by Naarmu Ensemble, performances of works by Peter Ablinger, Christopher Hobbs and Pauliina Turakka-Purhonen took place on a joyous summer day. At the destination a free dinner and sauna was offered, and everyone was invited to join to play Christian Wolff’s Stones, a Naarmu staple.

A third walk occurred on 5 August 2023 with curated performances by Ava Grayson, Kirsi Heimonen and Aimo Katajamäki as well as pieces by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Chant and Pauliina Turakka-Purhonen proposed for communal activity.

CONDUCTING (2015–)

Since attending Atso Almila’s preparatory class at Sibelius Academy in 1995, I’ve been fascinated by the parallel between calligraphic and sculptural gesturality in orchestral conducting and string playing. In 2015 I started to actively pursue this interest with UMUU Ensemble, performing a wide range of repertoire in a variety of situations:

Earle Brown:
Centering (with Erika Maalismaa, violin)

Mauricio Kagel:
Sextett

Phill Niblock:
Baobab
Disseminate

Luigi Nono:
Risonanze erranti (guest conductor with NYKY Ensemble)

Frederic Rzewski:
Coming together (with Tuomas Lehtinen, voice)

Erkki Salmenhaara:
Elegia II
Wind Quintet

James Saunders:
assigned #5
assigned #9

Giacinto Scelsi:
Kya (with Taavi Oramo, clarinet)
Natura renovatur

Salvatore Sciarrino:
Introduzione all’oscuro

Karlheinz Stockhausen:
Adieu
Zeitmaße

Matthew Welch:
Symphony in Drones

Christian Wolff:
34 Haiku (with Tuomas Lehtinen, baritone)

Iannis Xenakis:
Morsima–Amorsima

John Zorn:
Cobra

My doctoral project consisted of five large-scale concert productions and a written dissertation.

The concerts surveyed experimental approaches in cello repertoire during the past 60 or so years. I explored innovations in timbre, compositional form and playing technique as well as propositions for new performative situations. The repertoire ranged from John Cage and other American postmodernists (Brown, Feldman, Gordon, Lucier, Niblock, Wolff) to European modernism (Dutilleux, Holliger, Kurtág, Meriläinen, Saariaho, Scelsi, Xenakis) and works of my own.

The dissertation began as an academic analysis of the aforementioned approaches. However, during the studies I had begun to lose interest in creating performances of experimental music and gravitate towards making experimental art with social, political and ethical implications. I changed course and wrote an artist manifesto instead.

My Manifesto of Sounding presents a utopia of musical experience as an interdependent and delicate organism of active participants. I present the metaphor of a spiral originating from music-maker and expanding first to an instrument, then to the immediate acoustic space and those present in it, and onwards to the world around us. Both performer and perceiver are psychophysically present and equally responsible for the sustaining of the spiral.

Using the historical language of manifestos, I redefine the concept of instrument to mean any such objects, elements or forces of nature that the musician may wish to include in his music. I discuss an artificiality of ritual in current performance practice and call for a more archaic, bodily and mystical way for sharing. I criticize equally tempered scales and advocate a deeper sensitivity to resonance. I argue for the superiority of holistic improvised music compared to the artificial boundaries of composition.

In the other two chapters of the dissertation I survey the history of manifestation and present a “confessional” text to elaborate on the change in my artistic identity during the process of artistic research.

CELLO, VOICE AND SAMPLER (2011)

The CD release unites the expressions that I was most interested in at the time: acoustic and electronic instrumental and vocal sound, modernist and post-modernist composition and improvisation.

Thus, I recorded solo works (all previously unreleased at that time) by Jan-Bas Bollen, Betsy Jolas, Keeril Makan, Usko Meriläinen, Giacinto Scelsi and Oyvind Torvund, juxtaposing them with improvised duo interludes with flutist Kari Heinilä, percussionist Mikko Hassinen (who also recorded the material) and keyboard player Seppo Kantonen.