Lotta Wennäkoski is a Finnish composer based in Helsinki. She has won praise and has been described as a lyrical Modernist and post-Expressionist. She studied violin in Budapest in her youth. She also studied music theory & composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as well as the Royal Conservatory of The Hague under Louis Andriessen.

Wennäkoski launched her career composing for radio plays and short films. Her breakthrough was her performance at the Musica Nova Helsinki festival in 1999. Her work consists of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, many of which are performed worldwide. Notable works include Sakara for orchestra (2003), the flute concerto Soie (2009), which was one of the recommended works at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 2012, Verdigris for chamber orchestra (2015), commissioned by The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, & the harp concerto Sigla (2022) for Sivan Magen & the Finnish RSO, which was awarded the Gramophone Award 2023 for the contemporary music category.

Wennäkoski was the artistic director of the Tampere Biennale festival in 2008 & 2010, composer-in-residence of the Tapiola Sinfonietta in 2010–2011 & designed the program of the Avanti! Summer Sounds festival in 2017.

Meanwhile, Heikki Nikula is no slouch either. He’s a Finnish musician from Seinäjoki, a small city in the southwest of Finland. He plays numerous wind instruments, percussion & harp but is most known for his work on bass clarinet. He is one of the only proponents of the bass clarinet as solo instrument & has a special fondness for free improvisation.

He graduated from the the Sibelius Academy & joined Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 1991, for whom he continues to perform. He also works with the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra Avanti! & the Free Okapi ensemble. He has also performed on numerous Finnish film & series soundtracks inc. the Battle for Finland. He has recorded 2 CDs of solo music for the instrument – Hoepnadium & Piping Down the Valleys Wild. He has been a member of the Helsinki Filharmonia since 1991, & is one of the original members of the renowned Finnish chamber orchestra "Avanti!."

Sound collage backdrop: b/art & Wreck This Mess

CM Hausswolff: Immersion at the Junction of Electronics & Nature 32

"I was thinking about immersion & that word – when you become engulfed with something, when you sink into something & you feel that you are a part of something."

Carl Michael von Hausswolff [also known CM Hausswolff & personally known as Mickey] was born in Sweden in 1956. He’s unusual in that he readily admits he is a NONmusician musician, untrained in any instrument, but still able to make music with available electronic gadgets.

He is both a soundsmith & visual artist, working intuitively in the area of where sound meets light. He uses recording devices such as the video camera, tape deck, radar, sonar. He investigates electrical currents and frequencies & how these relate to architectural space. His electronic voice phenomenon [EVP] recordings, proposes conjuring up voices of the dead through radio signals much like Moriconi proposed.

His work has appeared at prestigious platforms & festivals such as Manifesta, documenta, the Venice Biennale, & many others.

His list of audio and visual work is long, esoteric and intriguing with provocative titles like "800 000 Seconds in Harar," "The Wonderful World of Male Intuition," & "There Are No Crows Flying Around the Hancock Building.” He is also a curator and, if that isn’t enough, he is King Michael l, one of several Kings of Elgaland-Vargaland.

This conceptual or conjectural nation, co-created with Swedish artist, Leif Ellgren is a state of mind, an art project – that covers a great deal of territory.

Although they first met in the late-70s, they came to know each other in the 1990s, when Charlie was based in Copenhagen for a time. They met in Gothenberg at Radium, an art gallery at the time. It would later evolve into a magazine, an independent record label establish in 1983, an organization that presented a film festival, a computer music festival, screenings, and exhibitions & also had their own recording & video editing studio, which paralleled the work Charlie was doing in New York with the New Wilderness Foundation established in the Ear Inn where they hade their own studio, cassette label & magazine.

Samples Playlist Boo Wa Wa Wa • Charlie Morrow Day • CM von Hausswolff Brigati Music • Charlie Morrow Song of the Youths • Stockhausen Flooded Lamphun Temple & Confused Hawks • CM von Hausswolff Hour of Changes • Charlie Morrow Water Drums • Baka Pygmies Koilinen • Pan Sonic Ramayana Melukat • CM von Hausswolff Amplified Piano • Charlie Morrow NY USA • Serge Gainsbourg

Selection of topics covered: immersion, ski slope ambience, flotation tanks, EVP, Vienna, rock ‘n’ roll, Radium label, academic training vs DIY, sine wave generators, Stin Hensen, Stockhausen, drone music, Guatarri & Deleuze, rhizomes, non-musician musicianship, nature as inspriation, MAGA, minimal music, joy of collaboration, Fripp-Eno, meeting in NY in late 70s, artfulness of life, Sweden, Lamonte Young, Steve Reich, Pansonic, oscillosopes, color field work, Lord Byron’s poetry, open to influx of information, acceptance, Sufism, Finland, Finnish Sisu or perseverance, Leif Ellegren, EVP, drones, facing fear, humility, computer music, American exceptionalism ...

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess

In the early 1960s, Poet & multimedia artist Gerd Stern & friends Michael Callahan & Steve Durkee founded USCO (an acronym for Us Company or the Company of Us). It became a burgeoning cooperative group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, & composers who worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York, north of NYC.

It is here that they emerged as probably the first producers of multimedia happenings, of immersive & oozing light shows, ephemeral performances that became all the rage during the height of hippie-LSD times. Part hippie, part beatnik, part Black Mountain, part Eastern mysticism, part fluxus, part political leftist, & part new music, they adhered to collective & inclusive artistic practices & preferred to work under the USCO name rather than as individual artists.

USCO utilized unique new uses for lighting, colors, projections, film, audio, & live performances to create multimedia & environmental art that included installations with slide projections, closed-circuit television, oscilloscopes, strobe lights, amplifiers, early IBM computers, live performances. This culminate most famously in the Expanded Cinema Festival & Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Theater & the first multimedia disco called Murray the K’s World that incorporated immersive technology & ideas, allowing audiences – many of whom may have been tripping – to feel as if they were entering a new, immersive, sensory realm.

They’ve performed or exhibited at many great museums, universities & venues including the van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Tate Liverpool, Pompidou Center, MIT, & RISDI. The USCO Church was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

I first met Gerd in the 20th Century. Born in Germany in 1928, he emigrated with his parents to the US as a refugee in 1936. Gerd & started crossing paths in New York City in the 1960s. We discovered common ground at a Phill Niblock loft concert in the 1990s. He asked me to write music & sound design for his play, “Lost Cabaret” or “Katandogastrophic,” produced for the 2003 New York Fringe Festival. I asked Gerd to create poetry for a 3D sound work Sky High. It is included in this iMMERSE! podcast.

Playlist mix by Wreck This Mess

When Then • USCO SkyHigh • USCO [Gerd Stern Poem, Charlie Morrow Music] Hubbub • USCO Insurrection Oratorio 1 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre Insurrection Oratorio 2 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre & various auditory intrusions

mix by b/art - Wreck This Mess