By Petteri Enroth

Flow Festivalin Monthly Deep Dive -kirjoitukset ovat tällä hetkellä saatavilla vain englanniksi.

In 2024, I wrote a lengthy essay in Finnish about Flow Festival’s The Other Sound program, the lesser-known and little-marketed experimental music portion of the event, which takes place on a specifically dedicated indoor stage. That year, the program included everything from the San Francisco-based Evichsen’s cyborg-like inquiry into the limits of music and assailing noise to Masayoshi Fujita’s gentle and sophisticated ambient pieces, inspired by the nature surrounding his home in the small Japanese village of Kami-cho.

I finished the essay with some remarks on how The Other Sound performances formed as if a space-time continuum of their own. The stage felt detached from the rest of the festival as much by the walls of the building as the music’s antithetical relationship to whatever was going on at and around the open-air stages.

The pinnacle of this impression was walking out of the festival Saturday’s concert by NYKY Ensemble, a contemporary music group consisting of students of Sibelius Academy, Finland’s prestigious university-level music school and part of the University of Arts. The ensemble played a selection of electroacoustic works by Kaija Saariaho, the famed Finnish contemporary composer who had passed away in 2023.

Saariaho’s works are intense, dreamy, organically shape-shifting force fields. They tend to slowly but surely create a whirlpool where pitch, texture, tempo and spatiality constantly slide into and generate one another. The overall sensation is often one where the minutest intimacy meets galactic scales, conjuring mental images such as a swarm of countless tiny living mirrors communicating like cosmic fireflies through space and time. In other words, Saariaho’s music is not only about aesthetics but includes an immediately felt existential, even ethical level. It seems to inhabit a universe that is equally desolate, cold and estranged as it is present and alive. A world never to be conquered or wholly understood, but lived one tiny event at a time, with the perennial risk of being wrong and misguided, never without struggle, with a faint promise that not all promises are mirages.

There are no vibes in Saariaho.

The tribute-like gesture of playing the recently deceased composer’s music added an extra dimension to the experience.

Upon exiting the stage’s building, my sense of time ground to stardust and my skull still sparkling and bubbling with the surges and vortexes of the music, I wandered across the main stage area toward the exit gate. Some Finnish artist on the stage was shouting above the festival noise something in the ballpark of “Give yourselves a round of applause, give yourselves some big applauseeee!”

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The contrast was surreal. I felt like I had been dropped on Earth with my memory first having been erased in the Mothership.

The moment was reminiscent of the experience of walking out of a movie theatre, slowly and reluctantly remembering what the world is like, how things work, and what it is to be a person. But this tension was an order of magnitude stronger, because at odds were not an artistically condensed mini-universe and the common humdrum of the everyday, but two insistently present artistic domains which, despite both being called “music”, have little to no common aims, formal characteristics, ways of sensing, and audience culture.

Sometimes, such experiences are accompanied by a silly, kitschy sense of “knowing something more” than others. This was the case here as well. I suddenly felt like I realized “what is wrong with contemporary culture”, how we are manipulated into hovering around our own little selves, monitoring our little emotions and congratulating our self-images to the point where we become gradually less human and turn instead into scalable multi-media ad campaigns of ourselves.

Not that such a development has not been taking place, but the way my sudden emotion rendered it was weapons-grade stupid and self-indulgent.

Feelings are the most wonderful thing, essentially what makes life worth living, but they should never be allowed to guide judgments on issues bigger than “what do I want to eat”, “I will walk this route” and “the breeze feels good on my skin”. Beyond that, they are a thing to be interrogated.

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Interrogate I did. First, it’s not hard to see that the context of my experience consists in one of the great features of music festivals, their collage-like nature.

Festivals are worlds of unexpected contrasts, mosaics of aural possibilities, intensifications of difference. Sometimes organically flowing, other times stunning, with a risk of annoyance, contradiction, and a strong impulse to escape that which is forced through the air into the ears. Attraction and repulsion mediated by sound, atmosphere and sense of space.

This has not always been the case. On the contrary, festivals have a long pre-modern history of locality, community and elevated familiarity. Later on, especially with the massive technologization, mediazation and cultural fragmentation of the 20th Century, the cohesive aspect of larger festivals has been more about genre – folk, jazz, techno, metal etc., with the accompanying wailing about the gradual impurification of such genre-based festivals as they try to financially survive in the changing landscape of macro trends and tastes.

Even though Flow obviously represents a contemporarily pluralist, post-industrialist occasion, the communal strand is still present in how it occasionally feels like a village gathering of Helsinki-based knowledge workers. Individual concerts might also facilitate spontaneous micro-communities and bring people together through momentarily shared ways of hearing, sensing, and taking the world in.

But I think it is equally fascinating to experience the festive situation from the perspective of differences and contrasts. I like to give in to this aspect and manoeuvre festivals, in addition to tipsy singalongs, ecstatic dancing in celebration of friendship and connection, and getting swallowed by the flashy visuals of a favourite artist, as places of inspired estrangement and delightful dissonance.

I am not talking about the all-too-familiar possibility of social perils like friends lost in the crowd, having one drink too much, or catching a glimpse of a loved one from a previous life – or, at worst, some kind of ill-fated combination. I mean the level of a festival’s artistic offerings. Whether or not I’m specifically “into” an artist, it is often intriguing to enter the force field of a concert after something completely different; to experience the essence of an artist through difference. Having two worlds rub against each other highlights what is important and meaningful in a gig, song or band. Why they exist in this world. Music is, after all, about giving wildly diverging meanings and intensities to time, and infecting the body and mind with some very specific significance.

So, a big part of The Other Sound’s importance in Flow Festival is to be a catalyst of carving out, sharpening and highlighting the edges of sound constructs whose differences and uniqueness are easily smothered by the generic word ‘music’. A piece of music often has more in common with a photograph, a novella, an oil painting, a forgotten dream, or the way the sunlight hits a surface than with another piece of music.

Indeed, the program is aptly named. The character of The Other Sound is more easily grasped through its otherness regarding basically everything else that happens outside of it than in terms of the program’s unifying characteristics. There are no cell phone videos, mosh pits, steady tempos, bass drops, three-minute songs, catchy choruses, or encores. No addressing the audience as audience. The Other Sound brings into play a very different kind of difference than that between, say, the feminism-tinged, dreamy paradise pop of Zara Larsson, the tradition-aware boom-bap hip-hop of Clipse, and the darkly glooming comfort of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

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It is not only in the arts that things get their weight and meaning largely through contrasts and differences, but in other aspects of life too. There is a reason why things like a gig, a festival, a kiss, an essay, a meal, and a moment of good-bye have durations and rhythms, or why it’s canonically nice to sit inside a warm apartment observing a freezing rainstorm. Life takes place as changes and shifts, and, personally, I can’t think of a better way to think of its sustained meaningfulness than by being able to experience the uniqueness of things in their details, nuances, and subtleties. This means noticing things that are not recognizable or relatable, and accepting there are worlds of meaning beyond familiarity.

Here, the arts can be a great teacher of the senses and the intellect.

The Other Sound has been a part of Flow Festival since 2010, but its marketing is basically non-existent. I’m probably not overreaching by claiming that the program’s financial value for the festival is negligible. There are certainly valid (cultural, structural, economic) reasons for the criticisms that have followed the growth of the festival over the years, but The Other Sound seems quite simply a quietly determined passion project inside the dense whirlpool of the event.

As such, it even has a kind of a retro character. It seems to represent a bygone epoch where, even if sometimes painfully pretentious, things like cultural curiosity, artistic ambition, and searching for unfamiliar things were self-explanatory parts of urban reality. An era when these things were not yet overwhelmed by the present algorithmic era of virality, calculation, and instant recognizability enclosed within a universe dictated by a raging storm of endless knee-jerk reactions and believing that every first impression counts as truth.

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Why not give the last word to Brian Eno, whose spirit lingers above so much ambient, noise and experimental music. The idea of music and sound giving shape to time and bringing forth differences in doing so is nicely captured in an interview he gave in 1996. Eno had recently finished composing the now iconic Windows 95 startup sound. He was commissioned to write a piece of music that was 3,25 seconds long with a weighty list of attributes like futuristic, universal, emotional, and inspiring.

He took up the task because it fascinated him as something “like making a tiny little jewel”. He worked months on the wee composition and created 84 pieces. “I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”

Oceans of time in three minutes. Such an experience would be a stretch to set as an aim of a festival weekend. But if not oceans, maybe it makes sense to think of a music festival as a gathering of decidedly different bodies of water, from a puddle of mud in someone’s footprint reflecting a night sky to a hole in the ice of a beach usually visited only in Summer. Splash.

Petteri Enroth is a Helsinki-based critic and writer whose interests range from sound art and installation to hip-hop and B horror. He writes regularly for cultural magazines, exhibition catalogues and other art-related publications, and currently works on his first book. He serves on the board of the Finnish Critics’ Association.