The premiere Sarana release Ajan Geometria out since May 2004 – The CD is available from Atmoworks. It’s $10.98 North America/$11.98 International, includes shipping.
track previews -
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Sarana’s music embodies that northern european experimental electronic sound like Vladislav Delay and Autechre to name a few. One can also hear faint elements of Brian Eno, Ken Ishii, and Plastikman although ultimately, Sarana arrives at a unified sound all his own. Sarana’s music is produced in a live setting with no overdubs, dealing fully with the present and meditating with the crowd in real time. Crossfading in elements and hints of eastern tonal colors unquantized and loosely held together strands of fiber optic beats mesh with a virtual array of glitches,drifts, drones, pulses, blips, bleeps. Produced and mastered by Vir Unis in the bubble studio.
Details
Ajan geometria translates to Geometry of Time. It was originally intented to describe the geometric properties of the cause and the effect, how things happen in certain patterns or sequences. I had this thought experiment once about a situation, where a stone is thrown towards a window. Could it be that at the exact moment of the throwing, the window is already shattered, and one only arrives to that moment a bit later to perceive this to happen ? There would be only one moment, the moment of the perception, around which everything changes.
Tracks 1 and 10 are excerpts from a live performance in a chill out room of a techno party. Etana is the name of the group which organised the event. It means Snail. I was amused by the contrast in the group’s name and the fast paced music they liked to play, and the word itself looked funny, so I decided to call the set Etana too. This was my first live set at an event like this, and I had a little too much equipment with me. At least I always had a synthesizer to tweak wherever I turned to. As all of my live performances, this was a complete improvisation.
Track 2, Salanimi, translates directly to Secret Name, and more officially: Pseudonym. The track contains a pretty complex set of interdependent triggering by certain sound components. There was about 3-4 infinitely looped sequences playing on top of each other like layers, all having different lenghts of beats, thus creating an ever changing combination of sounds and rhythms. The actual combination of the layers in the final recording was (and is still in my music) a surprise to me. I visioned an arabic village, having a spontaneous or traditional musical occasion, with the synthesised desert wind and all..
The name of the track 3, Alinomaa, means Constantly or Continually, a literal and oldish expression. It could also be translated to Alino Land, as maa means Land. A mysterious place in the space maybe, of which the track sends an aural postcard. The third translation might be Ali’s Own. Who knows, a strange humour seems to pervade my track titlings.. The original length of the track is about 12 minutes.
Track 4, is an old piece of music, transferred from some nearly forgotten c-cassette. One can hear the funny stereophasing and distortion of an old tape. The title Tankata means To Fuel, and comes from the looped sample resembling some fuel pump maybe. The original idea might have been to make an eerie and mystical world to rise from the mundane.. From the technological to organic and beyond, all the way to the outer space and further. This was probably done in a couple of minutes and recorded straight, I used to create 3-4 tracks a day those days.
Track 5, Omille, translates to something like To/For the Own… The original piece is over 20 minutes long. Improvised and continuous tweaking of the sounds on a looped sequence.
Track 6 is from the same period as the track 2. The name Philotic Parallax Communicator comes from a sci-fi trilogy written by Orson Scott Card. The first book, Ender, was one of my favorites when I read it as a child. The device makes it possible to communicate instantaneously over light years, and at some point the philotic web itself organises into a sentient being. The spacious synth that is introduced in the end is Korg Polysix playing an arpeggio of certain notes. This arpeggio is triggered forward by some other sound in the track, making the actual melody and it’s rhythm semi-random in a sense that it’s unpredictably derived from a set of possibilites, that I have given. As is the case with the second track, it was the 3th or 4th recording that produced the desired combination. The image I had was of american/south american indians rowing a boat in a shadowy jungle in the night and singing along with their ancient spirits, the river ends up being a way to ascend from the jungle to reach some other state of the existence.
The 7th track is from the album Smaragdi, and is called Uudesti. The literal and rarely used title means Again. A result of a couple of hours of work. I remember thinking back then, that this was taking too much time to do, and was somewhat frustrated about it. The sort of a melody here comes from Polysix, which plays an arpeggio of a single note. The filters are in self oscillation and not in tune with each other, so when the arpeggiator triggers the six different oscillators sequentially, it creates a melody that repeats itself every sixth step with some slight variation each time. The original length is little over 10 minutes.
Pah., the 8th track, relates to the tracks 2 and 6. The name comes from the human like sound crafted with ESQ-1, which seems to make sort of an annoyed and tired statement. The layering and polyrhythms mentioned before take place while I control the usual gradual appearance of the different sounds. Other noticeable element is the concept of self-sustain, where the sounds trigger the others which in turn trigger the original sounds, keeping themselves alive and playing. It’s a sort of a feedback loop of audio signals, which lingers in the very delicate state between the fading out into the nothingness and growing into pure chaos.
Track 9 is from a cassette too. Somewhat unusual as a style for me. Korea translates to Fancy and Pretty. The title seems to describe the music and has the reference to the country too. Probably just recorded straight after the song was wholly created. I usually make the peak of the track first, the point where it ends, with all the elements looping infinitely in the climaxing state. I then plan how to bring the elements up, and start recording. The tape deck was a bit laborious to set up (There was a certain glitch which made the motor turn at wrong speed, which I had to correct by sticking in a screwdriver in a certain angle to hold certain two parts together) and all, so I just recorded all the tape tracks straight without retakes how they ever came up and moved on to build the next track. Nowadays it’s easier to make multiple recordings, which in turn makes the music to lose a bit of it’s spontaneity.
Track 11 is the latest creation on this CD, from the autumn 2002. The tracks cover pretty much every year since 1997. This took longest to make too. My latest tracks seem to take an infinity to create, sometimes weeks or months. It’s the sound tweaking part that has gotten longer, the actual idea or the basic setting is done in a few minutes to a few hours. The original length of this track is over 10 minutes. Aura means Plough, among other things. The elements here are again coincidental and synchronistic: the melodies, sounds and details just happened to settle in to their places.
Ujona, the track number 12, is a swift creation to fill up the A side of a cassette. The title translates to something like As a Shy. I never accurately knew how much time there was left when beginning these final tracks, and had to watch the tape recorder to correctly time the ending before the tape run out.
Track 13 is based on a repeating melody played by DX-7, receiving whatever midi note data that came from the drum machine. The melody here was a surprise to me too, when experimenting with such midi routings. I still nowadays try this often to see what comes up. Sanomiseni means about My Sayings. I had this little project going on then to collect up finnish words, that would look like foreign or international when written down.
