Wow, long time no post. Life has been crazy recently. And with recently I mean quite a few months. But I think that this is also an integral part of this ongoing experiment in being an artist living through this internet-mediated platform-chocked timespace called the world in 2025 (give or take some decades). The pauses, I mean. As blogging on a personal website allows me to develop and share things in a more considered, timely rhythm, so should it allow me to breathe with life as needed, and allow for absences too.

But I am not here to write about life, I am here to write about art, which is also life, though of a special sort. Just felt like stating that hey, this blog is still alive and intent on being written, and that the author really hopes life will not crazy them into another months-long pause. The non-social-media-social-media-for-an-artist-experiment deserves to go on.

But so, life. Life of an instrument to be precise. Chladni Quartet is an exciting project in the sense that it is, in fact, an electroacoustic custome-designed instrument based on by itself inert matter: chladni plates made of metal, contact resonators, amplifier, wire, synthesizer and so on. All dormant stuff some would even term dead, as in not-alive. But in fact, that is not the case.

The development of the whole piece is premised upon the puppeteers attitude of assuming all matter animate. The resonators resonating their plates, matter coaxing resonances and ringings out of other matter not strictly or initially put there by a human-musician. Sure, no music would happen at all if in the first place a human was not there to set the system in motion, but neither can the human make this kind of music without subjecting to the conditions and materially mediated will of the things with whom they play. Without allowing themselves to be animated by the very system they in turn animate. (As it is perhaps clear, there are no two systems at play here, in fact, but an intra-acting assembly of music making. The puppeteer-system and the puppet-system are inexrtricably and fundamentally bound together as one.) Which is why life is a central word to the whole.

It is always a bit awkward, to talk about life of objects, since they in fact do not live in the same manner as us animals, or plants, or even bacteria or fungi do. (I much rather regard objects animate in general.) Thus they also cannot die the same way we living will, yet many people into puppetry like to talk about the life and death of objects. I must admit to doing so myself as well over this weekend. Two contact-resonators broke down even before making it to the concert on saturday in Punctum as they were overloaded with a feedback loop. So the musicians that they were a kind of beating heart to, died, if only temporarily. As my father likes to say: “money buys things and a horse takes you places” (rahalla saa ja hevosella pääsee), and so it is only a matter of acquiring new contact resonators to make the musicians whole and alive again. Still it is the case that at the moment the musicians are inert, and dead. Yet, somehow, I would hazard the argument that they are still animate.

What I found fascinating about the purported deaths of two of the four Chladni-plate musicians in the quartet, was that the death was of an unprecedentedly puppetlike kind. The puppet indeed stays animate despite dying. Giving an introduction to the newly organised Chladni Duo on saturday, after Radím graciously opened the event and Dan Nulty had played his Metal-Sheet Music, I had to tell my audience why they won’t be seeing a quartet play today. That there has been a death in the family. A tragedy, though not one beyond repair. With the audience present we find it an explicit moment of puppet-animation, this mode of language. Attending to things as animate animates them, or allows us to perceive them being as animate as they already anyway are. Speaking of things as dead and/or alive instructs us to consider them as we do other things dead and/or alive. As does the act of the puppeteer breathing with their a puppet, rod in hand and focus incessantly on the back of the wooden head.

Chladni Quartet will have it’s next concert in Kutomo in Turku in just two weeks time. The weeks will be super hectic for me with grant deadlines, road-tripping with my trusty old Fiat Panda back from Prague to Turku as well as a mushrooming course, but somehow there will be time to breathe life back into our two temporarily deceased musicians, I’m sure. There has to be, because a quartet of two will start to feel lonely for the remaining members, me included, if half the resonating matter has to stay inert for too long.

A very big dekuju moc to everybody who came to the concert on saturday, attended the workshop on sunday and especially everybody at Punctum who made it possible for me to be their microresident #3! Thank you for the space to develop the work, the soup and lečo to nourish me and others as well as for being awesome and amazing in general.

This microresidency was generously supported by Punctum, Grus Grus Teatteri, Trial & Theatre and a traveling grant from SKR / The Finnish Culture Insitute