Marja Ahti
Visiting Cloud (Two Translations)
Blutwurst

Interview with Marja Ahti

First of all, could you explain how this project came about? Was it your initiative, or Blutwurst's?

The project was initiated by Blurwurst in 2021. Daniela (Fantechi), Marco (Baldini) and Luisa Santacesaria) approached me with the idea to start from one of my electroacoustic works and translate it into their acoustic dimension. As a first piece, they chose Fluctuating Streams (from The Current Inside, 2019) and asked my permission to start working on an adaptation. In the spring of 2022 they sent me an initial recording and I provided some comments and requests to help them keep it in the spirit of my work. The piece was first performed live in Lecce the same fall alongside two works by Walter Marchetti. Around this time we were talking about adding another piece to the repertoire and they asked if they could start working on a transcription of Chora (from Vegetal Negatives, 2018). It was a surprising choice, so I was very curious to hear what their interpretation would sound like. With Fluctuating Streams there is more of a chordal structure to start from, but Chora consists largely of analogue filter feedback tuned by ear, wobbling and sliding pitches, percussive thuds from the levers of a pump organ and an intimate field recording from a monastery in Greece. We continued working on both pieces in person in the summer of 2024 as I was finally able to visit Florence for a week of rehearsal, culminating in a concert with both pieces as well as my solo electronic set. It was really wonderful to spend that week together in music and friendship.

When Blutwurst were working with you on the acoustic renderings of your pieces, was the aim to try to make the acoustic versions sound like the electronic originals, or was the point to use acoustic instruments to create a completely different soundworld?

The aim was to use the originals as a creative starting point for a new soundworld and to investigate how the idea and spirit of the original pieces would carry through into a new medium. First of all, the acoustic versions are stretching the duration into a completely different time frame, with Chora about twice as long and Fluctuating Streams over three times the duration of the electronic piece. This slowness and gravitas is something I very much associate with Blutwurst’s aesthetic. This kind of spacing is something I’m even more interested in now than when I made the original versions, so we were really able to meet each other in this - almost like I was able to correct some things that I wish I’d had more patience with in the originals. With Fluctuating Streams I wanted the elemental associations in my piece to carry through. My piece evokes airy streams and upward movements, almost like condensation, so we were, for example, working with adding an airy quality to the playing, while still keeping the focus on pitch relations and difference tones, that was central to the arrangement.

Have you composed works before for acoustic instruments, or is all your previous music electronic?

Most of my previous music is electroacoustic. I've worked on some cross-disciplinary pieces with both notated and process-composed music for acoustic instruments within the context of performance art. And a little foray into composing for electric guitar quartet invited by Sähkökitarakvartetti, a Finnish ensemble. In the past few years I've been increasingly welcoming acoustic instruments into my soundworld, making collaborative recordings with cellist Judith Hamann and at the moment with contrabass clarinettist John McCowen. My recent work Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth is a piece that combines acousmatic sound with live percussion, cello and bass clarinet. So I'm getting more interested in composing for acoustic instruments these days. I was recently invited to compose a solo piece for shakuhachi player Kiku Day, which I'm looking forward to diving into next year.

Could you say a bit about your musical background, and how you came to experimental music?

I started out studying saxophone and guitar as a teenager, playing in bands and different school constellations, mostly jazz and indie rock. Leaving school, I felt like being a musician was not the right path for me. At the time I had something of an existential urge, a hunger for learning, and so I went to university to study literature. I didn't articulate it like this at the time, but I felt it would teach me something about the human experience. So, I put aside making music completely until I graduated.

By this time I really missed music, but I didn't want to get back to where I left off, so I sold my saxophone and bought some studio equipment and a sampler and started to make electronic music with whatever sources I could find. I had just met my partner, Niko-Matti, and he had been involved in the Finnish experimental music scene since a young age. Moving from Sweden to Finland at that time, I felt really empowered by the DIY ethos of the people I met, so that definitely gave me a sense of being allowed to experiment in a new way.

You said that when you came back to music after university, you sold your saxophone and bought studio equipment instead.  So, at that stage did you reject acoustic instruments completely?  And why do you think you’re now more open to them? 


No, not at all, I wasn't rejecting acoustic instruments as such, just the idea of being an instrumentalist myself, with the limitations of being married to one instrument, daily rehearsals and drills, the strong genre associations of the saxophone and probably mainly just myself being stuck in some uncreative patterns that needed to be uprooted. I’ve never actually rejected acoustic instruments, I’ve just gravitated to sound sources and technologies that were available to me, easy to use and relatively unbound to conventions. Something that I could mess around with. Gradually, as I’ve found my own language with these methods, I’ve been able to see how acoustic instruments can be an equal way of expressing this language. At the same time I’ve also come back to wanting to play acoustic instruments myself - to have a more embodied musical practice - so I’ve been exploring wind instruments again, as well as percussion and kantele. I’m not yet sure how and if this will be part of what I do, or if it’s just for my own practice.