A work of ever-shifting sound design by the Helsinki-based musician
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Olga Palomäki’s piercing, churning, often frightening “Groundwork” transforms everyday noise into something bracing and enigmatic. It’s urban cacophony rendered as a hyperreal installation. It’s echoes in which the original source audio is entirely lost to the hall of sonic mirrors. What for a moment is just rain on a heavily trafficked street is suddenly a warped blanket of strangeness. The humming of a tunnel is suddenly a zombie chorus. Industrial clanging proceeds as the sense of scale sways from skyscraper cladding to slide-door rattling. The end effect is prime cinema for the ear, not necessarily telling stories, but laying out the scene for countless ones. It lacks the metronomic pulse of minimal techno, the nihilism of overt noise music, and the utility of a generic sound design cue. It’s its own thing, its own unnerving place, its own richly detailed setting.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/olgapalomaki](https://soundcloud.com/olgapalomaki/groundwork-olga-palomaki). More from Palomäki, who is based in Helsinki, Finland, at
[olgapalomaki.net](http://olgapalomaki.net) and [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/user10494510).
Part squishy aquarium gurgle, part off-kilter rhythmic patterning, part droney melodic quaver, “Nord” by Pythagora is a brief glimpse at a synthetic sound world. Its component parts are so distinct from each other that the finished piece feels more like sound design than like a musical composition, in that it seems more about setting a sense of place than about expressing a narrative — which, come to think of it, is a fine alternate definition of ambient music. Now, virtually any music can be said to suggest a place, whether through direct or indirect association, through genre or lyrical content. What makes a piece like “Nord” ambient is its emphasis on place and mood above all else. (Presumably it is part of a larger construction, because it ends quite suddenly.) There is no development, per se, though some elements do appear to shift in relative importance. What there is is a depth that situates the listener amid the composition. You don’t listen so much as you submerge.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/pythagora](https://soundcloud.com/pythagora/nord). Pythagora is Dan Henry Pålsson of Malmö, Sweden.
Emily Sprague patches her modular synthesizer, sets it running, and checks in on it hours, even days, later to figure out where the generative invention has meandered and matured, what strange familiar-yet-unfamiliar music it’s gotten up to. She initiated her relatively recent self-education by mainlining module manuals and studying the videos of a handful of people (notably [Lightbath](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNcpKG4D0_nxBYwtgD4iA7w) and [r beny](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5hhwOVY0lxIn4ELd5ZP1Bw)) whose aesthetic and approach appealed to her (i.e., largely ambient, if gently melodic, and lacking a fixed rhythm). She says she likes tap tempo, for the organic feel, and certain filters, for their ability to self-oscillate. She began to share videos of her own work in part to replenish the well from which she’d drawn, and also out of an awareness that modular synths are a male-dominated thing.
Here’s an early such video, from May 2016:
And here’s a gentle, burbling track from about a year ago:
These are just some of the things we learn in the excellent [eighth episode of the Sound + Process podcast](https://soundcloud.com/sound-and-process/es_ep8) hosted by Dan Derks. Interspersed in the podcast are demos of the music that will appear on her forthcoming solo modular synth album. Sprague, who also is part of the folk-pop band Florist, talks about gaining fluency with patching by buying and selling modules, seeing what works for her and what doesn’t, and how warm and welcoming the synth community, in particular on the [llllllll.co](http://llllllll.co) (also known as Lines) message board, has proved to be.
And after listening to Sprague speak for an hour, you also can check out some of her band Florist’s music, and hear that same voice sing. This track is [“What I Wanted to Hold,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsEqf5_RFMQ) off the forthcoming Florist album *If Blue Could Be Happiness*, which is to be released on September 29, 2017:
More from Emily Sprague at [soundcloud.com/mlesprg](https://soundcloud.com/mlesprg) and [twitter.com/emyspraguemusic](https://twitter.com/emyspraguemusic), and [her YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx6KAGjiD7QOQD_ZqLdEUeQ). Subscribe to the Sound + Process podcast via
[iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/sound-process/id1112057891?mt=2) or [RSS](http://feeds.feedburner.com/SoundProcess).
The San Francisco airport, SFO, regularly features engaging exhibits. There was one recently about the art of ouija. Titled The Mysterious Talking Board, it brought a halo of sound to the topic, insinuating the notion of the “voice” of the unseen, otherworldly interlocutor. Currently in Terminal 2 there is a show that calls out for a sonic complement. The Typewriter: An Innovation in Writing (which runs from May 13, 2017, through January 28, 2018) displays dozens of typewriters from numerous stages of the technology’s development and, like this Chinese item shown here, from various places where characteristics of specific languages put unique demands on the underlying concept. I came away from it excited for another glimpse after my return flight, but also wishing I could hear what these different machines sounded like when in use.
