For many composers of the younger generation, sounds are deeply entangled with the surrounding world, and the composer’s role is that of a facilitator, adaptor or co-creator rather than a traditional auteur. Ville Aslak Raasakka and Lauri Supponen have formed unique ways of thinking about composing. For Supponen, this means essentially multidisciplinary practices, combining performance art and philosophical enquiry with instrumental music. Raasakka takes sounds as imprints of our world, capable of making an impact on the world. Both encourage deep listening in the most powerful sense of the word and reach out for a strong connection with the listener.
Material voices
I hear moaning and ripping, growling and hissing. It is the voice of the trees, their branches creaking angrily as some forest machines, apparently, draw near and the felling begins.
This miniature audio drama enfolds in Tree Bark (2020) by Ville Aslak Raasakka (b. 1977), a 15-minute piece for wind quintet. The music in this all-acoustic work is not only created by woodwinds, the players puffing and panting into their instruments, but also inspired by wood and the woods.
In the works presented on the album Coal, Wood, Oil, Raasakka uses a highly unique composing method, revolving around analysing and acoustically recreating field recordings, his own as well as archival ones. The compositions are soundscapes for biodiversity loss, but Raasakka goes much deeper than proclaiming ecological crisis.
The album title, referencing natural resources, underlines Raasakka’s quest into the materiality of sound. There are hardly any traditionally ‘musical’ sounds on the album, tuning the ears to a different kind of listening. The compositions take you into crevasses and pores of the environment, to surprising and even forbidding spaces like the insides of a power plant. It’s the most literal opposite of abstract music, and challenges the role of the composer as a creator: Raasakka composes by interpreting and rearranging existing sounds he has collected. It makes the composer a listener – an almost revolutionary act of refusing to create something new. But, in this intricate process, the banal and the ordinary turn into something extraordinary, sometimes beautiful, sometimes gruesome, and take us deep inside the complex relationship we have with our planet.
Dwelling in sound
A same kind of invitation happens with Dwell, the second release by Lauri Supponen (b. 1988). Following the experimental, manifesto-like Solsirépifpan (2023), Dwell comes across as a more traditional profile album. It even has a retrospective feel as it includes Supponen’s works dating from 2016 and 2017. But with Supponen, even a ‘traditional’ album is far from conventional. In line with his typical playfulness, the disc is wrapped in pale blue cloth, inviting us to feel and dwell on sound. As with Raasakka, the compositions are not so much music as sounding spaces.
Compared to Coal, Wood, Oil, the places on Dwell are intimate, drawing you inside. The theme of the album is indeed home, from childhood memories to housing technology, but also dwelling and belonging in an existential sense: embodying a space, staying still, feeling at home.
The theme of home originated from soprano Tuuli Lindeberg and guitarist Petri Kumela, both long-standing champions of contemporary music in Finland, who commissioned the album’s title piece. Dwell turned out to be a seminal work in Supponen’s career. It is a loose series where he combines minimalistic, tactile sound fields with echoes of medieval music and even Gérard Grisey – an allusion quite extraneous to the whole, but perhaps complementing the diary-like character of the work.
Cosmic cosiness
Supponen’s album constantly fluctuates between sounds as becoming and sounds as presence. Gentle sounds float, flutter and sparkle like specks of dust in a sunbeam, sometimes creating decorative images as on a medieval manuscript. Alongside medieval texts is the children’s book The Trip to Panama (1978) by the German author Janosch. Little Bear and Little Tiger leave home in search of Panama, and after a while they end up back home, now thinking it the utopia they were seeking. It’s a beautiful metaphor for artistic work, or life in general.
Indeed, life and art are always entwined for Supponen. Gaz aux étages for viola d’amore recreates an encounter with the composer’s childhood violin, the bow caressing the contours of the instrument like embracing a long-lost connection.
The album invites the listener to adapt their ears to smallest of changes. The extremely subtle movement surge you to keep still, sensing the stillness. This is the home, the Panama you already have but must search for, on the inside.
Supponen’s idiom comes most naturally with wind instruments. Eau & gaz à tous les étages is a piece for the amazing clarinettist-composer Madison Greenstone as well as for a dark-sounding mausoleum in Oslo, Norway, which suspends the sound into a multileveled flow. It is the movement of a subconscious space, conjuring images of deep water and cosmic breath. This happens in opus nen as well, written for an electronically enhanced baritone saxophone and the extraordinary musicianship of Sikri Lehko. The low saxophone seems to embody some ancient elemental force deep below, sometimes bursting forth in screams and incantations that feel both magical and unsettling.
Everyday rituals
Both composers have a strong affinity with theatricality. The materiality of Raasakka’s compositions, their willingness to witness something hidden beneath our society, lends them a stage-like and documentary character. They also have installation-like features, like Oil Rig (2020) or Coal Power Station (2016). In the latter, the instruments wander through different areas of a recently closed power plant, staged for our ears through field recordings.
The pieces in Raasakka’s Everyday Etudes series use everyday objects and performance elements. Without the visual elements of a live performance, the theatricality of the pieces is actually enhanced, as the listener is intrigued to question the source of the sounds.
Supponen works intensely in dance, performance art and theatre, and on this album, opus nen has an almost ritual dimension: towards the end of the saxophone solo, an ad hoc choir – an audience substitute – begins to slowly sing the syllable ‘nen’, which is a typical ending for many Finnish surnames, including that of the composer. In the quiet chanting there enfolds a sort of meditation of anonymity, the self dissolving into a gentle and shared silence.
Lauri Supponen: Dwell.
Marco Fusi, Petri Kumela, Tuuli Lindeberg, Madison Greenstone, Sikri Lehko
OSK (2025)
Ville Aslak Raasakka: Coal, Wood, Oil.
Zagros, Earth Ears Ensemble, Kazutaka Morita, Lambis Pavlou, Maria Puusaari, Eeva Rysä.
SibaRecords SRCD-1030 (2024)