Terra by Ilpo
Terra is taken from my forthcoming album Flash of the Spirit which will be released in the autumn 2018.
Terra and its B-side Fela's Car combine my dearest musical influences from Afrobeat (Fela Kuti), Electro, Krautrock (NEU!, Can, Kraftwerk), Malian Blues, Minimalism, Soul, even Gospel, into a coherent and original sound of its own. The tracks are based on my travels and field recordings in West Africa. The idea has been to create a new kind of music, or music from a possible future: timeless and geographically global, less concerned with styles and genres, experimental yet accessible and uplifting. I often imagined this music emerging from some imaginary hybrid city of Lagos and Düsseldorf, actually.
Art is a way to imagine possible worlds and to pull ourselves towards a preferable future. With Terra I was drawn to the potential of life when not hindered by unnecessary societal and financial designs; of human cooperation; celebration of existence; and to our future coexistence with the natural world. A utopian idea perhaps, but certainly a possible one.
The tracks have had a long evolution. Fela's Car was originally made in the early 2000 when I was studying sound art in London and passionate about combining my ideas and impressions of everything African, a continent where I'd never been to, with my electronic music at the time. In the following years it went through several permutations, but never seemed to find the right home...until now, as a B-side (in the future I hope to make a proper song version of it). Terra was born in 2010 when I was collaborating with an African-American painter Odili Donald Odita on our track for Another Africa. Inspired by his rhythmic and vivid, abstract geometric paintings, I made several variations of the initial piece, and Terra became one of them. Years later I reworked it for my album Sahara - recharged by my travels and musical experiences in West Africa by then - but it just never fit the final sequence, and I forgot it. In the subsequent years the stereomix of the track kept surviving my frequently breaking harddrives, and when I stumbled upon it last winter, I was astonished: it wasn't just another failure of mine, it was a failure that had failed better than most, ending up somewhere quite unexpected.
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Tracklist
| 1. | Terra | 4:24 |
| 2. | Fela's Car | 4:19 |
Credits
Written, performed and mixed by Ilpo
Produced by Ilpo
Mastering by Niklas Silen
Cover art by Ilpo Jauhiainen
License
All rights reserved.
Ilpo (Ilpo Jauhiainen, b. 1977 Finland) is a composer, music producer and sound artist. He works collaboratively and globally across the arts. His musical interests revolve around the possibilities and combinations of music and sound art, new global musical styles, contemporary classical and generative music.