The art collective Eloa Culture Company presents the world premiere of Estonian composer-bassist Mingo Rajandi’s work “Ained ja lained” for bassoon, electronics and lights. The concert takes place in the German Church in Helsinki, Finland on Saturday, November 23, 2024.
Mingo Rajandi tells about her new composition: “I first started to think of this piece during the surreal years of the pandemic. At that same time I was involved in an interdisciplinary project that was working on some of the phenomenons of physics and space. With our artistic team we went to see a physicist at the University of Tartu and I remember how overwhelmed we were by what we heard that day. The physicist talked with such passion about space and black holes and the expansion of the universe and so on. All this was literally so unimaginable to me that when I tried to picture some of the concepts in my head I got the feeling that I was going to faint. It really made me feel so tiny and unimportant and stupid as well.
The physicist tried to describe the universe to us with words and numbers but for me it was way easier to think of it through music.
Ained & Lained or Matter & Scatter is inspired by that exact feeling – of being a tiny creature in the turbulence of something mastodonic and utterly indifferent to your sufferings.
In my music I’m not trying to describe the conditions of outer space but more those of my own mind. The mind that could also be seen as an expanding universe.
When you close your eyes and push your fingers on them really hard you start to see the space. That was one of my favourite games as a child. I have tried to create that ambience with my music. It’s a sort of a dance of planets, stars and spatial trash that collides and bumps into one another, explodes and burns and freezes. And the mission of each of those elements is to develop, grow, exist and not to be sucked into the Black Hole. It’s a choreography of resistance to the inevitable. But is falling into the Black Hole the end or is it the beginning of something new, something that our human brains are not built to even imagine?
It was a fascinating journey to play around the ideas of space without having to understand them. The process of creating this piece was also novel to me. I wrote the score but the electronic background is created based on my score in collaboration with two extraordinary Estonian musicians: Sander Mölder and Ahto Abner. We had lots of fun creating our own little universe.”
The concert programme includes two more premieres from Anna Emmeluth and Turkka Inkilä, who has further developed, for this occasion, his composition “Almanac”. Anna Emmeluth’s “Lys, mareridt, lys” pictures a nightmare one sleeps through in its entirety.
The programming of the concert is curated by bassoonist Antti Salovaara together with the performers. The new works of the programme wave their way through a mix of unfathomable chaos and bright reality. Valtteri Mustalahti acts as the lighting designer of the concert.