Name: Niko-Matti Ahti
Nationality: Finnish
Occupation: Sound artist
Current release: Niko-Matti Ahti's Kaivajaiset is out via Students of Decay.

If you enjoyed this Niko-Matti Ahti interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on bandcamp. We also recommend our previous, more expansive 15 Questions interview with his partner Marja Ahti.



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound and what sparked it?

My fascination for sound is a quite common musical growth story. As a youngster, in the early nineties, I came across local bands from my hometown Pori, Finland that made a heavy impression on me. One can make great music nearby!

In some months I also walked into the city's library and found free jazz and European improvisation. A revelation. I knew nothing about it or no one who was listening to it, but with its force it pulled me right in. Some time passed, I met people who were interested in the same area of music and in some years we had a real community in Finland, and little by little, elsewhere, too. Almost all of the people from that era of my life are still my best friends.

Then, as late as 2015, there was another big turning point: I found my way to what is called sound art. I had had a musical longing, but I didn't know for what. Somehow I wandered to that direction, and after listening to Eliane Radigue's Usral and Henning Christiansen's Kong Frost I knew that was what I had been missing.



I didn't know where the path would lead me, but I couldn't wait for starting to walk it. I felt just like with free jazz 23 years earlier, my ears had opened and I wanted to see the whole the scenery. The history is always present though the context might be new.

What have been some of the most beautiful/intriguing sounds you've heard and some of the most beautifully/intriguing sounding places you've been to?

Everybody feels the power of sound wherever they are, whether they know it or not. My most intriguing sounding place must be the archipelago of Oura, located in front of Merikarvia, Finland. There are more than 300 small islands and islets full of cliffs, stones and buckthorn. God toppled his stone load here, they say.

In the 80s and 90s my parents were using a summer house in Oura, so I spent my holidays there. Good memories and bad memories, but the place itself made a magical impression on me. Water, hay, birds, trees, animals – everyday sounds, but as we know, very distinctive. It was as if there were no sounds at all, though it was full of them. The ripple of the sea water, always the same, never the same. Seagulls and terns. More peaceful than anywhere, warm and lively. Even the storms felt safe and, literally, sound. These surroundings were absorbed in me already when I was a child.

My partner Marja and I don’t own a boat, but we managed to loan one from Merikarvia in 2017 and 2019. Finally we could spend some time together in Oura. Marja had never seen the place, but heard many stories about it before. We were tenting on an island, living in the middle of it all.

The local culture still leaves the archipelago in peace for some hours in a day. When it's sunny and warm and everything feels stagnated – no sound is more beautiful to me than what I can hear there. Silence that is not silence.

Luckily, Oura is now part of Natura 2000 -network of nature protection areas.



Where do you find the sounds you're working with? How do you collect, and organize them?

The verbs in the question are 'find', 'collect' and 'organize', so I will say something about field recording.

We have two good and compact Sony-recorders, they are my main tools in that area. Nothing compared to expert's sets, but very practical and inventive in everyday use.

Four different ways to work:

1) Accidentally come across sounds and try to dig up a recorder as fast as possible.
2) Go around with a recorder and try to find sounds.
3) Stay in one place long enough to hear interesting sounds.
4) Hear sounds that will recur, listen to them and at some point record them properly.

All four methods provide treasures.

Organizing sounds is my obsession. I'm just trying to take care that it doesn't get too extreme, though sometimes extreme is welcome. How do I organize them? A very everyday method: I use Reaper to move and rework files as long as I feel there's something to do to them. After that, it's done.

The most interesting question concerning field recordings is when and how to concentrate on narrativity or different qualities of the sound itself. A boy blows a balloon until it breaks and then laughs about it or a bicycle chain squeaks with certain frequencies that react with other material? When and how to explicate meanings or withdraw from that and let the sound just exist?

To consult authorities, Luc Ferrari writes in a letter to Pierre Schaeffer:

”I have increasingly been interested in observing society; this has gradually drawn my work away from music's traditional abstraction (even when it is called musique concrète), and it has led me to look for meaning, which I see as ”commitment”.”

With Kaivajaiset, I am definitely exploring the path of observing – but also abstraction. These paths are not binarities, but one has to choose the percentage in each case. In this way Kaivajaiset is close to Henning Christiansen's work, political meanings are allowed.

As an artist I will not choose a certain method or emphasis to always follow, all my life or a certain era. Sometimes it varies within a day, my work can be more ”musical” than ”concrète”, sometimes more political and sometimes not at all. Et cetera. Variation and complexity is always welcome, even when it frustrates me.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools?

The key word in my creative processes is easy to name, although it is not without contradictions: dilettantism.

I have never had music education nor tried to work on mastering an instrument. If I could choose now, I would definitely have them both! (For free, it seems.) Instead of paying the dues, I have found myself a different way to operate: I have been working on a piece of art, every day, on the basis I have already had at each time.

It seems that despite my deep admiration for many professional practices, dilettantism has drawn me like a magnet. Originally the two-edged word didn't even have the negative connotation, only the positive one: someone is examining and studying many things on his/her own. Luckily the concept has many different realisations even today, and for some time now, for example, learning some music theory has been part of my everyday work.

Then again polyethism and specialization, the concepts our current capitalist societies stress, are very problematic for me. They have also conquered the arts in a different way than in the past centuries. For me there is value in not letting one's interests to be limited in one or two areas of work. There are exceptions of course, thank god, but the grant application discourses are sadly mostly taken over by the ethos of professionality and results known in advance.

I come from a non-academic, middle class family that was living with its problems when I was young. From there I strayed into university and started to study literature and cultural history. It was very important to me and suddenly I fell in love with essays. Finally someone I can talk with! And none of the text characters were ”professionals” or bounded by only one area of interest or one way to work. Instead, the leitmotif was to let one's thought wander and intuition lead, and let them form their own kind of a puzzle and river of words.

Another keyword: cooperation. Like I said, meeting people is essential to me, to work with them at least as valuable. In Kaivajaiset, there are many people involved. There wouldn't be the sound of a violin without Appu, flute without Hanna, or clarinet without Harri; no voice without Timo; no lay-out without Mikko or a record without Alex (of Students of Decay). In fact the whole process is a communal effort.

In this way one of my main tools is to be social enough to form communities that work together. It has always been like that. I never intended to have my name – only one name – on a record cover, but because of the Kaivajaiset installation, here it is, on a cover of an lp, and I'm thankful for it for the rest of my team.

The same idea lies in the heart of mine and Marja's work as Ahti & Ahti as well as within our Himera work group, and all other cooperations I am part of past & present & future.



In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. Do you feel these terms have a relationship to your own work and approach towards sound? What are the “material” qualities of sound?

I'm tempted to start talking about different qualities of sound, but I can't do it in a concise way; my knowledge base is not sufficient enough. So, I will resist the temptation and refer to three examples instead.

If we think of Annea Lockwood's "Tiger Balm," Radu Malfatti's "Shoguu" and, if I may say, Marja Ahti's Still Lives, they all concentrate on the material qualities of sound, but in different ways. On "Tiger Balm" you hear more raw sounds that are woven together ...



... on "Shoguu" bare sounds of two instruments and a room playing as material objects, ...



on Still Lives more layered and frequency thought-out everyday sounds and modular synthesizer.



Many times Alvin Lucier is mentioned as the main figure of the sport – as he is, too, and in a way that differs from the previous ones – but in reality it all started many centuries before on different continents. A big praise to all those people. I could say that ”material quality” of sound refers to the dilemma of how interesting it is to listen to one sound without a big portion of narrativity nor ”sculpture” or ”design”.

Then again sculpting and designing refers to modifying sounds which has been one of the starting points of musique concrète. Again that is a question of ratio. Luc Ferrari's first "Presque Rien" was not accepted, because the sounds were not modified. He broke the rule.



And for example on Graham Lambkin's album Community, Lambkin describes his work to be ”recorded” and ”assembled”: now it's possible not to have to modify.



On Kaivajaiset I use both methods although I concentrate more on not modifying recorded sounds. In this way it is a sound collage.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold from your point of view?

If my surroundings and the sounds in it were like in Oura archipelago, I would gladly live in the middle of it all for my whole life. Easily and delightfully.

But living in a city, like we do, it is like being in an eye of the storm, mostly the sounds are stressfull.

When it comes to ”music”, I – and we – actively follow and listen to it, but it is not in the air all the time. Silence is golden.