Join Sonic Acts Academy for the world première of Marja Ahti’s multichannel speaker composition The Altitudes. The Finland-based musician and composer is known for her work with duo Ahti & Ahti and solo project Tsembla in which instruments and objects make slippery harmonies. She now abandons measured rhythm for modular synthesis, crunching sounds that roll across field recordings where the familiar, rendered unrecognisable, becomes precious.

The Altitudesis a 20-minute multichannel piece premiering at Sonic Acts. Imagining a vertical movement through layers of air, the speaker composition unfolds with a slow intensity, interweaving concrete and electronic sound. Traversing the altitudes, a landscape of entangled elements, masses and currents emerges. The air has weight that presses against everything it touches. As gravity pulls it to Earth, it is sensed as pressure. The rotation of the planet, the angle of the sun at any new moment sets the elements in motion. Behind the waves and currents there is silence.

Commissioned by INA GRM as part of Re-Imagine Europe.