To speak about my latest work, Interbody, I need to start a little further back. Over the past few years, my music has explored time and space, shedding light on these themes from different angles and through different methods. This exploration has resulted in a trilogy of pieces: CHRONOVARIATIONS, Light Cones and Interbody.

CHRONOVARIATIONS, my previous album, a 3D sound work for tenor saxophone, live electronics and resonating metal objects, harnessed the medieval Nousiainen Church as one of its instruments. The composition itself is inherently spatial, and the recording is binaural, meaning that the sound envelops the listener and places them inside the recording space, as if seated in the middle of the church. Through headphones, one can hear the surrounding scrap metal objects, set into resonance by electromagnetic actuator loudspeakers fed with my saxophone signal, precisely from the directions in which they were placed in the church.

I have always been interested in using music technology as a form of “magical realism” translated into the language of sound. I am interested in enhancing characteristics already inherent in sound as physical phenomenon, such as overtones and resonance. In CHRONOVARIATIONS, these explorations formed the core of both the composition and the realisation. As the composition thematically unfolds through minimalistic chains of variations that eventually create maximalist walls of sonic textures, the metal objects rumble while spectral and time-stretching effects amplify and render the overtones and resonance of my saxophone audible.

Site-specificity has been fundamental to my practice. When performing CHRONOVARIATIONS live, we – Esther Calderón Morales on live electronics and Kaj Mäki-Ullakko as sound technician – always built the surrounding sound installation to respect the acoustic characteristics of each venue. At times, we were able to make parts of the building itself resonate by placing the actuators on existing structures. On one occasion, we even found a spot where the room produced subharmonics – frequencies ringing below the pitch of my saxophone. Rather than trying to make the piece sound identical each night, we came to cherish these phenomena.

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Back in 2024, I had the joy of spending two weeks as a residency composer in Ställbergs gruva, an abandoned iron ore mine turned into an arts centre, composing Light Cones for alto and tenor saxophones and string quartet. A light cone is a diagram illustrating causal connections between events in spacetime. The piece draws inspiration from fundamental concepts in physics, such as Planck time (the minimum interval of time) and the absence of a universal present. It also explores time, memory and the layering of multiple perspectives within a single moment. Each movement symbolises distinct aspects of time, whether in theoretical physics or human perception, such as the concept of entropy or the feeling of waiting, holding space for something that is still in the process of becoming. During the compositional process, I spent hours playing in the old elevator machinery hall of the mine, which originally housed the first elevator transporting miners as deep as 500 metres, where they then switched to another elevator to descend further. Through a site-specific method, I was able to base the spectral tonality on the room's natural resonance and its remarkably rich overtones.

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These two pieces have been attempts to expand my instrument and music into space – within Light Cones through site-specific exploration and by tuning the piece to the space, and within CHRONOVARIATIONS by quite literally spreading my experience of saxophone playing into the space by running the cables and sending my saxophone signal to resonate in every corner of the space, amplifying even the almost inaudible sounds of airflow as part of a massive sonic sphere. In my latest work, Interbody, an EP released at the end of April 2026, I turned my gaze inward towards the space we carry within ourselves.

Listen! The stretches, bends, twists and sprains, a cut; cell membranes yelling the sensations before comprehension as electrical impulses and a beat; a pulse compressing the flux from chest to fingertips and from cheekbones to earlobes, the teeming congestion of existence – an imperative to move, as everything inside is rushing.

Interbody examines time from the perspective of the human body: attuned to the millions of intersecting currents rushing within us at every moment, the hum of blood in one's ears after running up thestairs, breathing and breathlessness, following how air flows into the lungs and oxygen molecules find their way. Interbody was recorded with multiple microphones surrounding me in order to capture a realistic sonic "close-up," in contrast to CHRONOVARIATIONS, where it was the room itself that was being listened to. I wanted to create an interpretation of these inner sounds –a translation of embodied experience into music, formulated in time.

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We regenerate and deteriorate, dissolve and crumble side by side aligned with our erosion. – – human lifetimes squished into the creases, a geological epoch

At the core of the piece is a tenor saxophone extended with live-electronic software called Pitch and Envelope Tracking Sampler Organism, developed together with Kaj Mäki-Ullakko. Using the visual programming language Max MSP, the software listens to my saxophone playing in real time and triggers samples I have created according to rules I have set. The basic idea is that each pitch is assigned a folder of samples, and the software launches two to four of them whenever that pitch is played. The software tracks both the pitches and the dynamics of my playing.

I use the sampler software as both a compositional and improvisational tool: a degree of randomness is an essential element of the software's algorithm. Sometimes the software has four options to draw from, sometimes a hundred. This feature makes it a fascinating tool for me as an improviser, since playing with the software becomes a kind of continuous, evolving feedback loop that forces me to stay on my toes and be ready to take the music in unexpected directions. This was the most interesting – and difficult – part of the composition process: how much freedom can I give to the machine? Where is the sweet spot between control and chaos? This is where I applied algorithmic thinking to my compositional process, taking into consideration the hundreds of possible sonic outcomes and structuring the themes, melodies and samples accordingly in order to maintain control over the overall sound and feel.

In the pieces "Tide" and "Aporia," I use my own text, written alongside the compositional process to crystallise my idea of the moods of each track. I read my texts as speech samples, so on the album you hear not only my saxophone but also my speaking voice. Through the software, my poem fragments become part of the album's sonic palette.

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Nadir : a drainage basin : a circle of seeped through subjects, templates precipitating, bouncing around, an oil spill standing out in the surface tension of melting ideas. Motifs skating on the surface like gerridae –

The samples in Interbody are collections of sounds I have gathered over the years.They vary from the aforementioned speech textures to synthesiser waves, from actuator rattles to masses of strings. In the closing track of the record, “Nadir,” I wanted to embrace the way creative ideas sometimes leak into one another, forming a continuum. I sampled the lush string sounds from the 2024 Light Cones premiere rehearsal recordings with Malva Kvartetten from Örebro, Sweden – cutting, layering, twisting and processing them to varying degrees. For me, it is a thematic homecoming, a full circle, another manifestation of cyclical time.

Poetic lines in cursive from Hartikainen’s poem “Flux” for Interbody, English translation by Ringa Manner.
Hartikainen’s website: https://helihartikainen.com
Featured photo Julius Töyrylä.