Marja Ahti’s music rarely commands attention. Depending on the context in which it’s played, whether listening on speakers or headphones, during a time of day bustling with activity or in the dead of night, the Turku, Finland-based Swedish sound artist’s pieces may easily slip into the background and disappear completely beneath the threshold of perception. At the same time, her subtle electroacoustic strokes contain an invitation to listen deeply, leaving behind a trail of found sound, field recordings, synthesizers, amplified objects, and inchoate effects to be assembled into a rewarding sonic narrative.
Ahti’s recent collaboration with kindred sound artist Manja Ristić, Transference on Erstwhile, is a lovely example of this approach: a collage of faint field recordings, strings, and percussion augmented by electronics that mimic them. The collaborative album is defined as much by the sounds exchanged between the two artists as it is by the silences that separate them. Gliding from that sparse architecture directly into Ahti’s Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth yields somewhat of a surprising experience. While the record’s two tracks still avoid any temptation of imposing themselves on the listener, they are that much more active and substantial, revealing an idiom born out of kinetic rather than static processes.
Even though sequenced as the second of two compositions, the eponymous ‘Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth’ is undeniably the main attraction here. The 20-minute cut was originally presented as a piece for four-channel tape, live electronics, and amplified objects at a 2023 Lampo concert in Chicago, then underwent several studio and live interventions, including a performance at the 2024 Edition Festival in Stockholm. The version included on the album is thus a sort of sonic quilt, a layered material stitched together patiently over time using sounds known and unknowable, some synthesised, others acoustic, created in collaboration with musicians Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet), My Hellgren (cello), and Ryan Packard (percussion).
Opening with the wrinkled and crunched whooshes of a light breeze and the timid cry of woodwinds, the track soon begins its subterranean descent, brittle progressions evoking the feeling of falling through Earth’s strata. A deep, longing sigh makes way for gurgling water bodies, then gets buried in sylvan, organic effects. A school of synthetic modulations and throaty reed tones swims by, ushering in a temporary lull until, finally, a howling yawn of a bowed string breaks the spell and reveals something lurking in the dark, like a startling twig snapping in the middle of a dense forest. From there, a crescendo of growling textures and steel bowl strikes softens into a section of saturated drone.
By contrast, ‘Still Life With Poppies, Mirror And Two Clouds’ is, as its title suggests, an impressionistic, vaguely meditative ambient piece that resembles a musical painting of pastoral scenery observed through the window of a solitary cabin. Ahti opens the piece with long, sustained tones, the spherical notes of rubbed glass bowl edges alternating with elongated pipe organ phrases – taken from recordings of Scottish musician Sholto Dobie’s custom-built instruments. Electronic chirrups and cicada recordings live side-by-side here, awash in waves of gentle static, lonely piano keys, the flutter of cello strings, and clarinet licks – again courtesy of Hellgren and Hedtjärn – contributing to an eerie atmosphere that teems with invisible life.
Both cuts share a sense of exploration, of feeling out spaces and tracing paths forward collectively, that gestures toward approaches usually found in free improvisation. As Ahti lets herself be led by these spontaneous expressions, they provide delightful new directions for her delicate world-building.
