Marja Ahti — Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth

Marja Ahti is a Swedish/Finnish sound composer working in the electroacoustic domain with a prolific slew of solo and collaborative works in the last 5 years on labels such as Erstwhile and Hallow Ground.

Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth is a subtle album of celestial synthetic high frequencies, bells with long, reverberant contrails, and three-dimensional air sweeps. Extremely high frequencies are employed, but never in a painful or unconsidered manner, tickling the eardrums in a constantly shifting spectrum of harmonics. The character of the tones is metallic, otherworldly and atonal. These are notes between notes, clusters of harmonics created as frequencies beat against each other.

Having recently listened to historic musique concrete works created using Buchlas (by Subnotick, Parmegiani, et al), I would describe this as quite similar, but perhaps with a greater precision of sound design as befitting the digital age, and a greater dynamic range. With an impeccable modern sound design, the position of each sound in the stereo field is considered and manipulated with surreal stereo effects.

It is a quiet album where each successive gesture is given a few seconds of space, yet is distinctly different in timbre and movement, so after the full thirty-six minutes, you are left with a nearly endless wealth of inventive sound design. In this way, it is similar to Stockhausen.

Some of the directional rushes of air become surprisingly saturated and almost percussive, and I wonder whether what I am hearing is processed field recordings of some kind. This is confirmed when rushing water is heard at one point. The mix includes clarinet and cello as well, though it is not immediately obvious, as the instruments are plumbed for strange sounds, with the cello resonating with odd harmonics eight minutes into the first piece, and the clarinet sputtering and squeaking.

This album is soothingly ambient with its intermittent warm undercurrents of air, noise, drone, and instrumental tones, but always active and engaging on all levels, with an intricate interplay of gestural high-frequency sounds. With a vast palette of perfectly processed and mixed synthetic and acoustic sounds, the listener is thoughtfully presented with a lush array of enjoyable sensations. For more