Roughly two years on from the towering accomplishments of ‘Tender Membranes’, the Swedish born, Finland based, electroacoustic composer, Marja Ahti, returns with two of her most stunning and ambitious releases to date: ‘Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth’ - a monumental work, utilising a vast palette of sonority and acoustic instrumentation, issued on vinyl by Fonstret - and ‘Transference’, a duo collaboration with the Serbian sound artist and composer, Manja Ristić, marked by subtlety and intrigue - riding the line between imagism and abstraction - issued on CD by Erstwhile.

Among every generation, there are artists who quietly rise to the surface and, through their delivery of craft and meaning, subtly lead the way toward unknown futures. Within the contemporary landscape of experimental music, few better embody this position than the Swedish born, Finland based, electroacoustic composer, Marja Ahti. Since the emergence of 2019’s full-length, ‘Vegetal Negatives’ she has continuously delivered an astounding body of solo work - 2020’s ‘The Current Inside’, 2021’s ‘Still Lives’, and 2023’s ‘Tender Membranes’ - as well as “Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?” (2020), her duo with Niko-Matti Ahti, and “A Coincidence Is Perfect, Intimate Attunement”, her stunning collaboration with Judith Hamann from 2022, each marked by an understated virtuosity and sensitivity, that has entirely reset conceptions of possibility regarding meaning and craft within her chosen idiom. Reaching a new high-water mark with two of her most striking and engrossing releases to date, in very different ways ‘Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth’ and ‘Transference’ offer yet further proofs that Ahti is one of the most important artists working in Europe today.

Active for more than a decade, first issuing solo efforts under the moniker Tsembla, as well as working within the psychedelic improv collective Kemialliset Ystävät, over the last few years the Swedish-born, Finland based, artist and composer, Marja Ahti, has risen to prominence within the global context of experimental music, increasingly gaining critical accolades for a series of releases issued under her own name. An artist who takes nothing for granted, through the vessel of her work, Ahti endeavours to challenge and reconfigure fundamental elements of meaning that are carried by language and sound, setting out to build them again from scratch. The result, blending metaphor and abstraction, seamlessly binds the familiar and known - be it fleeting impressions of the natural world or elements and approaches to experimental music - through a radically unfamiliar pattern of human action and thought.

Ahti’s latest - building upon the accomplishments of a string of solo releases since 2019, housed on labels like Black Truffle, Hallow Ground, and Students Of Decay - ‘Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth’, stands among the composer’s most ambitious outings to date, expanding her sonic palette to include more recognisable acoustic instrumentation, working in collaboration with musicians - Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet), Ryan Packard (percussion) and My Hellgren (cello) - who currently stand at the forefront of experimental sound, pushing the perceived potential of their respective instruments into new realms.

The work’s title track, comprising the second side of Fonstret’s LP, draws largely upon material recorded at the electronic music studios (EMS) in Stockholm, building upon a previous iteration of the work presented at Lampo in Chicago. Following that original version, Ahti presented a new realisation of the work at the Seventh Edition Festival for Other Music in February 2024 with the trio of Hedtjärn, Packard, and Hellgren performing live on stage while she helmed the mixing desk, spatialising a specially made tape part through the INA GRM’s Acousmonium speaker orchestra. Despite the towering heights of artistry reached by that version, Ahti further pushed the piece into subsequent states until she arrived at the version encountered here, across which immense bass pressure and high frequency tones dance with the restless punctuations of amplified breath and timbral interventions, as each element folds within a vast landscape of intimate detail, extraordinary dynamics, subcutaneous activity that eventually conjoin as resonant forms and ritualistic passages, carried by a profound sense of beauty.

Operating as a fascinating and deeply engrossing double to its counterpart, ‘Still Life with Poppies, Mirror and Two Clouds’, to which Ahti has dedicated the first side of the LP, draws upon many of the same instrumental recordings used within ‘Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth’, as well as older recordings she’d made of Sholto Dobie’s diy pipe organs and uses these to create repeating patterns and flourishes of sliding pitches that emerge unexpectedly out of cycling passages of Ahti’s clear struck metal, destabilising electronic interventions and minimal piano figures. Moving between passages of dense, resonant drones and dense movements of complex abstraction that incorporate a vast number of intervened with sources, with subtlety, grace and power, at every turn Ahti reconfigures the perceived poetic potential of organized sound.

Like so many of the releases that have preceded it by Ahti, ‘Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth’ has left us speechless and in awe.

As evidenced by her early work within Kemialliset Ystävät, her acclaimed duos with Niko-Matti Ahti and Judith Hamann, and most recently across the length of ‘Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth’, collaboration has always held a central force within Marja Ahti’s practice. ‘Transference’, her first release with the American imprint, Erstwhile, encounters her further expanding this crucial dimension of her creative voice, finding her in intimate dialog with the Serbian sound artist and composer, Manja Ristić, collectively forming a deeply engrossing spectral landscape from captivating resonances, tonal and textural interventions of striking detail and virtuosic form.

Such a perfect collaborative match for Ahti that it’s surprising that the two haven’t come together sooner, Manja Ristić’s practice spans installation, performance, and recorded work, through which she explores the intersection of field recording, electroacoustic processing, and the politics of place. Coming together across transnational and geographic division, each artist, through the composition of ‘Transference’, perfectly balanced their own bodies of sonic source material - Ahti contributing recordings, electronics, objects, piano, percussion, and bass harmonica; and Ristić adding recordings, electronics, objects, piano, violin, and cello to the collaborative matrix - as well as each artist’s unique conceptual frameworks and sets of sonic concerns.

Culminating as a “profound investigation into the movement and transformation of energy between distant practices and places”, which Ahti and Ristić jointly describe as "a dialogue of sonic gestures and traces of visits to places and the spirit that occupies them” and "a map of subtle and drastic differences, a space where the contours of sound and silence merge, and where listening becomes a collaborative act of discovery and associative intuition”, ‘Transference’ comprises five pieces by the pair across its duration, throughout which structure, over explicit processing, pushes the clear traces of acoustic source material and their inherent properties, toward states of total abstraction. Remarkably detailed and tense, while equally seductive and captivating - like tightly wound sonic knots that intermittently enter states of release - the conceptual framework of ‘Transference’ places its resulting proximities within what the artists call "the ongoing metamorphosis of the sounding world as we observe it", moving beyond notions of recording being a practice of documentation, but rather “active participation in the transformation of sonic materials across time and space”.

Encountering them working together for the first time, ‘Transference’ represents a deeply affecting state of creative accomplishment in both Ahti and Ristić’s respective careers. It’s a truly singular and stunning statement, the dimensions of which continue to unfold and reveal themselves across durations of time and space.