The recent works composed by Ville Aslak Raasakka are based on field recordings of coal, wood and oil, as well as various situations in which they are present. The works have dealt with coal, oil and wood mining, drilling and felling, energy use, product use and the spread of end products back into nature. The composer has recorded and collected sounds from a Finnish coal power plant, Pennsylvania coal mines, a British oil rig, petrochemical byproduct-based cosmetics, packaging materials, insecticides, logging in Finland and plastic waste on the seabed off Helsinki.
The works on this album present the chamber music fruits of this body of work. As a kind of introduction, the earliest work on the album, Everyday etudes No. 1: garden (2015) deals with the city dweller's relationship with nature through gardens. Coal power station (2016) takes the listener to the Hanasaari coal power station in Helsinki. Everyday etudes No.3: fireplace (2021) brings the listener close to the sounds of making a fire and burning wood, and in Tree bark (2020) the quietest sounds of tree bark are interpreted by wind instruments. Everyday etudes No.2: benzene (2019) brings the sounds of petrochemical-based beauty products and the music imagined for advertising them into an art music context, and Oil rig (2020) brings the sounds of a British oil rig, the sounds of the oil and the workers, into a chamber music context.
Ville Aslak Raasakka works with ecological topics, and aims to bring the listener closer to hidden sounds (oil rig, coal power plant) and quiet, ignored sounds (bark, beauty products). We do not relate to nature in one place of our choice, but in a kind of network of spaces and objects to which we are connected by our presence, actions and consumption. A sensory-based and affective approach to examining our own actions awakens us to observe our place in and our mark on the multifaceted network of the environment in a new way.
Performers on the album: Zagros, Earth Ears Ensemble and Lambis Pavlou, piano, Kazutaka Morita, objects, Maria Puusaari, violin, and Eeva Rysä, cello.
