TOLVI, ANTTI - Spectral Organ/Feedback Gong

"Finnish artist Antti Tolvi operates at the nexus of performance and installation. His work, which is concerned with how sound operates in the spaces that contain it, is a meditation on how sound reveals itself, in time and in space to the listener. Each of the works captured on this edition dwell in the reductive, the subtle and the sustained. The pieces seek to draw attention to microtonal variation and flutter. They arc in a slow reveal that highlights Tolvi's patience and his unwavering desire to create work that invites us to become settled within it.

From Antti Tolvi: "'Spectral Organ' was played and recorded with no over dubs in Kemiö Island, in a 14th century church on 22/9/2019. We have these acoustically amazing spaces even in the smallest villages and towns in Finland. In every space there are these unique and solid, super complex analog wave generators ready to play. You just need to get in and turn the wave generator on. Even this particular, very basic church organ has around 2200 tuned pipes... Because of high amount of pipes and the fact they are often not so well tuned, all kind of interesting microtonal intervals are easily found. The idea in this piece is to create static spectral sound sculpture. An invisible, in situ, air sculpture. A sculpture where you can enter, stay and leave. It is a kind of floating architecture inside the visible architecture. This sculpture will always be different in each different church. In this recording I play almost whole piece just by slowly opening and closing the stops. This organ luckily has mechanical stops. In some organs stops work with electricity. Usually this means that stops are either completely open or close, not anywhere between. This limits notably the amount of colors you can get out of organ. You will lose the possibility to slide from tone to tone. The second piece, 'Feedback Gong' is a recording made as part of a sound/light installation I completed in early 2020. The installation was premiered at B Gallery Turku in midsummer 2019. The installation has on-going feedback though a 20" gong cymbal. The cymbal hangs between two microphones and a 15" speaker without any physical contact. 'Feedback Gong' has a pretty similar invisible sculpture idea as the first piece does. Here we give the most delicate decision to the feedback circuit. These small differences and variations make alter the sound and create the nature of the piece..." - Room40.