By Paavo Kässi

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

I

We were sitting in a somewhat average and borderline-tacky bar in Kaisaniemi district in Helsinki, when, encouraged by the deceitfully strong Belgian Trappist beer we both had just enjoyed, my friend made a confession: ”I love looking at other people when I’m a bit tipsy.” Having said that, as if we were orchestrated to do so, we nonchalantly began to scan other customers in silence.

We humans are social beings, and being interested in others is part of our nature. As a musicologist, my (kind of a guilty) pleasure is eyeing how people consume music. Some wear noise-cancelling earphones while jogging or riding a bike in a dense traffic, others lash out trashy Eurotrance while driving a car or fill public parks with 80s heavy metal with Bluetooth Boomboxes that go to eleven. My real kink are musicians, who read sheet music in public spaces and move their hands as if they were leading a tiny orchestra. (Happens surprisingly often.)

Music is the instrument of instruments. We listen to music when we exercise, try to focus on our work, or ignite certain emotions depending on how we happen to feel. Typically, this happens with the help of playlists provided by streaming services and their algorithms – the so-called ”mood machines”. On a less transparent level, music is being used to get us emotionally more connected to different activities. Feeling emotional while watching a movie with a string adagio in the soundtrack, or experiencing an urge to spend more money in the supermarket as muzak hums in your ears? Congratulations, you are being manipulated.

And yet, music is fundamentally a form of art. What art is, then, depends on definition. Philosopher Alva Noë’s thoughts about art are especially intriguing. Noë describes art as a philosophical practice that forces us to think what an artwork is about. According to Noë, the difference between art and non-art is that art cannot be reduced to its mere instrumental value. Take design, for example. Design object is an utile, a beautiful device, whose value is ultimately determined by its clearly defined instrumental use. Good design brings closures: a good hammer nails it. Art, however, opens up worlds that are often messy and hard to define. If we say that a song is good, we can never reach an agreement about how.

This, paradoxically, does not mean that art is devoid of any function. According to Noë, art can and must be used in order to experience it, but not in the same way as technological devices such as a hammer, a paintbrush, or a computer. This is because art is a strange tool. Now, what is this strangeness? It means that in order to experience art we don’t simply sense it. Instead, we organise it through numerous cognitive and embodied schemes that are based on how we’ve learned to understand music through customs, institutions, and subcultures we are and have been part of.

When perceiving an artwork, Noë says, we ”use” art by entangling ourselves with it. Entanglement does not mean that we grab the physical piece of art or gaze it intensely. It means that our sensitive bodies are part of the same material (and immaterial) world as the artwork that has captivated us. Art is kind of a chaotic good thing.

However this raises a question that I want to look closer into. Given that our hyper-advanced everyday technology lets us experience music and other people in incredibly realistic and detailed fashion anywhere we want, why is it that we still want to see music live? Do we really need the real world?

For a long time, my own answer would have probably been no.

II

I grew up in rural Finland, where I spent most of my youth playing computer games and listening to music on CD or radio. Live concerts were nonexistent, and to see one you had to travel 40 kilometers to the nearest city. Since the showtime was always somewhere around 10 pm, the only way to get home was having a car. Good luck being an underage music enthusiast.

Back then, hearing music live in a concert was an anomaly for me. Nearly all live music experiences I had came from watching concerts on TV, which I recorded on VHS. (Also back then: no internet.) No doubt that this solitude and remoteness played a significant role in how I learned to use music. The few times I managed to attend a live concert, the result was always either perplexing or disappointing. I remember being jealous of how other people could interact with other members of the audience – and even with the band! – as if they shared the same secret code I simply couldn’t cipher. Listening to records at home felt safer and easier. Music was my own private tool, because in public, it caused me pain.

But we do things for the thrill, right? After growing up and moving out, I started going to gigs with my friends from the university. Entering adulthood in a new city with new social circles began to arouse exciting possibilities that were related to hearing music live, which, in turn, meant learning new ways to use music: accepting the hazards of live music and embracing the dark. See, concerts usually take place in the evening or in the night. Every time we go out partying, we kind of step into an alternative world that shares our day-time world, but feels a bit out of joint.

There’s a reason for this sensation. Sauli Okker, a sociologist and musician, who has both done research and participated in underground techno parties, has described them as forms of heterotopia. Following the theories of the philosopher Michel Foucault, Okker says that, unlike its imaginary counterpart utopia, heterotopia is a fantasy that really exists. Heterotopia can be compared to child’s play. Despite the subject of the play being imaginary, the play itself is real. A good example of how heterotopia manifests is through the construction of a festival. A festival turns a regular everyday space into a temporary state of carnival, creating its own world within a world. Case study: Flow Festival.

III

When we arrive at Flow, we find ourselves in the midst of a former industrial area of Suvilahti, where massive architectural behemoths climb over the darkening horizon of the wallowing sea. This rough, urban frame, mostly covered by asphalt and a field of sand, is suddenly decorated with glimmering lights and visuals, and if stars are properly aligned, the carefully composed space will be accompanied by the ascending Moon as dusk turns into night.

This is how Flow looks and feels like, as it rests in the conjunction of brutalist power and ethereal luminosity. What it is being excluded is the counterpoint for all this: in vain will you look for ski cottages or mud baths. This exclusion is crucial to what Noë calls style. For Noë, style is not some superficial feature, nor simply an expression of cultural capital, but an extremely nuanced way of being in the world. Style is our way to express who we are and aspire to become. It’s something we both choose and something that chooses us: we embody a style to express us in a desirable way through the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, and the artists we revere. It is also present in reasons we go out. We want to go dancing for some reason; we know the place, the people, the music. Our expectations are related to the style of the party we are attending, even though we cannot exactly say what they really are.

Work of an artist is thus work about style. Listening to the Finnish jazz pioneer Juhani Aaltonen and his quartet frames musical entanglement differently than Honey Dijon’s hypnotic house sets or Nick Cave’s quasi-religious musical services. Artists strive hard to achieve a style that is unique and recognisable, not just because it’s essential for their craft, but because art is essentially an expression of a highly perfected style created by a fellow mortal. To paraphrase David Foster Wallace, art is about ”what it is to be a fucking human being.”

I believe we want to hear music live, because it gives us a way to express ourselves by sharing the style of the music(ians) we love with others, who know how to value our style. I experienced this, when we started a DJ club with a friend of mine, with an aim to simply play music we like, have fun, and dance. That’s when I began to grasp the nature of how we perceive music: every audience is always standing (or sitting) on a dance floor.

What is a dance floor, then? A dance floor is the conjuncture of abstract expectations and materialistic conditions. When we dance, we don’t just dance on something. We dance in it, through it, with it, we organise our movement with all the possibilities the ground under our feet (or wheels) provides us. These possibilities, or affordances, using the concept by psychologist James J. Gibson, show how we interpret and interact with the features and qualities the surrounding material environment provides us. And we must not forget that when we dance, we are not alone. Even if we are simply sitting, the movement of other bodies determines our own.

IV

To sum up, whether IRL really gives us anything or not, I will use a personal Flow history.

I witness details that engrave themselves into my cognition so strikingly that later, when I picture the moment in mind, I barely need to close my eyes, and they surround me again. The colourful sphere emerges over our heads, as the band – three men, with the look and couture of classic handsome Hollywood movie thugs from the 1950s – perform their sophisticated and highly original fusion of American rhythm music traditions. The aesthetics of the band is in perfect unison with the music, and the venue highlights this. I turn my head and see the irresistible joy of the dancing audience, while my friend, who is dancing next to me, shouts that this is hands down the best concert of the festival. There’s magic in the air, but I’m completely sure none of us can really explain, what is actually happening.

All I can do is to pay attention to the inframince. Originally used by the French-American avant-garde pioneer Marcel Duchamp, inframince is a moment so short between different phenomena that it’s hard to put into words. It’s something we can only experience. Dancing in a crowd is sequence of these inframince moments, as every dancer at some point will accidentally glance others or touch their bodies, pay attention to some note or sound, and then in a blink of an eye retreat from these more or less unintentional acts and move focus somewhere else.

This is how we are with other people: we are constantly leaning towards each other. Just like me and my happily intoxicated friend let our eyes wander from table to table in a dimly lit bar, we humans are thoroughly enthralled by others. The entanglement with other bodies in a rave party or a pop concert is a form of art through the inexplicable process of sharing. We the people are aesthetical objects, who share the same style of existence we somehow simply know, even though we cannot give a label to it. As we dance, the art of music makes us become art through enactive participation.

Back in my personal heterotopia, I grin and shout back to my friend that I agree with him. While dancing, I notice how I begin to organise my body into different movements that are defined by a certain kind of circle of interpretation. I imitate the pace and style of musicians, I recognise the gestures of how my friend is dancing. I start moving accordingly, while slipping in my own moves I have learned on all the dance floors I’ve danced on/in/with in my life. In the warm, golden light of the venue, I notice that the way I dance has taken the style of what is surrounding me.

We all share the same style of being, and we all smile never wanting this moment to end.

Paavo Kässi is a musicologist, musician, poet, and writer.