Tip! Marja Ahti is a Swedish artist living in Turku, Finland. She works with found sounds, objects and electronics, creating auditory assemblages that reveal a profound sensitivity to sound’s tactile potential. This new record sees her palette expand to include more recognisable acoustic instrumentation, albeit working in collaboration with musicians who are already reconfiguring how those instruments can sound.
Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth has its roots in a tape piece presented at Lampo in Chicago. Ahti then started working with Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet), Ryan Packard (percussion) and My Hellgren (cello) at the electronic music studios (EMS) in Stockholm. Incorporating recordings from those sessions, Ahti presented a new iteration of the work at the Seventh Edition Festival for Other Music in February 2024 with the trio performing live on stage whilst Ahti helmed the mixing desk, spatialising a specially made tape part through the INA GRM’s Acousmonium speaker orchestra. The piece has since gone through several further iterations before arriving at the version we have here on the LPs B-Side where immense bass pressure and high frequency tones buffer restless amplified breath and scrape that folds over itself with extraordinary dynamics and subterranean activity before giving way to gorgeous resonant forms and passages of ritual purpose and sheer, unmistakeable beauty.
The A-Side is Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth’s gentle double. Still Life with Poppies, Mirror and Two Clouds offers a companion reconfiguration of Ahti’s resynthesised percussion sustain and the same recordings of Hedtjärn and Hellgren from EMS, but here they’re nestled in a sonic landscape of calm and restraint that gives them a wholly other character. Ahti also draws on older recordings she’d made of Sholto Dobie’s diy pipe organs and uses these to create repeating patterns and flourishes of sliding pitches that emerge unexpected out of cycling passages of Ahti’s clear struck metal, destabilising electronic interventions and minimal piano figures.
