Johanna Elina Sulkunen
Coexistence
DENMARK TILA TILA002 CD (2024)
Finnish composer Sulkunen, currently based in Copenhagen, has won some plaudits in the Danish quarter of the jazz world, partly for her jazz-ish voice exploits and her performances with jazz players and improvisers. But she’s quickly expanded her ambitions and also experiments freely in the areas of electronic music and contemporary avant-garde composition.
Her voice may be one of the primary means of expression at her disposal; there’s the vocal group IKI in which she performs (an all-women troupe, incidentally), and since 2018 she’s been developing her Sonority alias; matter of fact, today’s record is credited to Sonority. After two Sonority solo records KOAN and Terra which were vehicles for her own voice, she decided to cast her net into the wider waters of society at large for today’s record. The starting point for Coexistence was conversations and interviews with fellow human beings, all of whom happened to be social pariahs or marginalised in some way – including refugees and homeless people. We often say that a lot of people in society are, quite simply, denied a “voice”; we never hear from them enough, they are silenced, or their voices are eclipsed by those in power (business, politics, establishment). Sulkunen’s plan is to “reflect on power relations” and “social hierarchies”, based on the simple principle of going up to these people and asking them what they’re got to say, adding the suggestion that “the whole world is listening”. Her sympathetic microphone is thus part of a wider project informed by very contemporary notions of inclusivity.
The recordings of these dispossessed voices have been reworked into unusual semi-ambient compositions, sometimes sampled, looped, cut up and otherwise woven into the fabric of the music. What emerges is not exactly a documentary work, or a piece of reportage on modern society; rather it’s a strange kaleidoscopic picture, or a “mosaic” according to the press release, with an array of treated speaking voices dissolving in and out of the fabric of the music. Very little of it is spoken in English, and what we receive is short fragments and atomised words rather than complete sentences, all contributing to this impressionistic whole. In this way, Johanna Elina Sulkunen doesn’t present a critical vision, sermonising about society’s problems, and I doubt that’s her intention. Rather it seems predicated on the simple act of listening. Through listening, we might take the first steps towards empathy, and growing a more compassionate society. The various speaking contributors are named inside the digipak – some of them preferred to remain anonymous – but it’s first names only, so there’s no data protection issues that might have arisen if this was an academic research project.
Interestingly, despite the theme and subject of Coexistence, there are no pictures of human beings anywhere on the artwork, which instead opts for 100% abstraction and tasteful colours. (22/04/2024)