MARJA AHTI
DATES
AUGUST 30, 2025
solo
Maja Ambient / Amos Rex
Helsinki, FI
SEPTEMBER 14, 2025
solo
Shimmer
Rotterdam, NL
NOVEMBER 23, 2025
solo
Edition @ Yeshin Norbu
Stockholm, SE
MAY 16-17, 2026
solo
TBA
Paris, FR
NEWS
My new record Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth will be released September 12 on Fönstret. You can pre-order the record and listen to the title track over at Bandcamp.
Marja Ahti / Manja Ristić - Transference - duo album for Erstwhile Records is out August 11th.
The new SPECTRES V ‘Diffusion’ publication is featuring my essay ‘A Way In’ reflecting on working with spatialising sound.
Residency with Tashi Iwaoka and Minna Koskenlahti at Contemporary Art Space Kutomo in Turku 4.-15.8. Performance demo Thursday 14th.
Mikko Kuorinki & Marja Ahti: Tulppaaniresitaatio – An assemblage of sounds from two exhibitions: Tulppaaniantenni (Ahti & Kuorinki, K17, Sipoo, 2022) and Resitaatio (Kuorinki, Sinne, Helsinki, 2023). Released as part of the radio show Untempo’s Postcards series.
CONTACT
email
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PORTFOLIO
TOUCH THIS FRAGRANT SURFACE OF EARTH (2023-2025)
Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth has its roots in a tape piece presented at Lampo in Chicago. Ahti then started working with Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet), Ryan Packard (percussion) and My Hellgren (cello) at the electronic music studios (EMS) in Stockholm. Incorporating recordings from those sessions, Ahti presented a new iteration of the work at the Seventh Edition Festival for Other Music in February 2024 with the trio performing live on stage whilst Ahti helmed the mixing desk, spatialising a specially made tape part through the INA GRM’s Acousmonium speaker orchestra. The piece has since gone through several further iterations before arriving at the version we have here on the LPs B-Side where immense bass pressure and high frequency tones buffer restless amplified breath and scrape that folds over itself with extraordinary dynamics and subterranean activity before giving way to gorgeous resonant forms and passages of ritual purpose and sheer, unmistakeable beauty.
Marja Ahti: electronics, field recordings, idiophones, amplified objects, piano, bass harmonica
Isak Hedtjärn: clarinets
My Hellgren: cello
Ryan Packard: percussion
Composed, mixed and recorded by Marja Ahti.
Mastered and cut by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich.
Artwork by Maija Luutonen.
Video documentation by John Chantler from Edition Festival rehearsals, EMS Stockholm, 2023
LP released by Fönstret, September 2025
THE ALTITUDES (2020)
”The Altitudes” is a multichannel piece commissioned by Ina GRM and Re-imagine Europe. It was premiered in 8 channels at Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam, 2020 and performed again at the acousmonium at Présences Électroniques, Paris, 2021.
Inspired by descriptions of the layers of Earth’s atmosphere, “The Altitudes” conjures a movement through layers of air, unfolding with a slow intensity, interweaving concrete sounds and closely tuned electronic sonorities. Traversing the altitudes, a landscape of entangled elements, masses and currents emerges. The air around us has weight and it 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 in a chain reaction.
Released on LP as part of The Current Inside, Hallow Ground, 2019
Tulppaaniantenni / Tulpanantenn / Tulip Antenna
Exhibition with Mikko Kuorinki at K17 – Space for Art and Ecology, Sipoo, November 2022
Tulip Antenna (2022) is a collaborative installation of objects and sounds by Mikko Kuorinki and Marja Ahti. The sounds and objects in the installation are physically, energetically and poetically linked to each other as well as the room and surrounding environment. They combine everyday materials – artificial, organic, decrepit, mint, momentary, timeless – in a gesture releasing them from their usual function and giving them another.
Sounds vibrate within the objects and the surfaces of the room. Sculptures speak through their own material, each assigned one voice, singing together in various constellations. Some objects are speaking, some are mute. Some are becoming charged with meaning and value. Sounding events are part of the ongoing vibration of the material world. The world is a flower, all phenomena are flowers. Where tile shards whisper, where dust heaps scream and shout – what does the tulip say?
More documentation from the exhibition here
THOUSAND TIMES YES
Ahti / Kausalainen / Kalliokulju
Experimental chamber opera for soprano, cello, harp, chamber choir and tape.
70 min
Performances:
Inkonst in collaboration with IAC, Malmö, October 2021
Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm, Naestved, May 2022
Kiasma Theater, ARS22 Live, Helsinki 2022
An ancient organism in the Earth’s crust has started to transform and rise towards the surface. Its movements are resonated by the surrounding bodies of Minerals, Bacteria, Fungi, Gasses and the Atmosphere, resulting instability and uncertainty that clusters into a web of unexpected conflicts. Our protagonist is a human called G, who is unwillingly equipped with a skill to connect and communicate with different bodies and beings. She is summoned to mediate between the conflicting parties – and eventually with the ancient underground organism itself. G finally throws herself to the task fully, but the forces of the Universe are unexpected.
Music by Marja Ahti
Libretto, scenography & paintings by Jenny Kalliokulju
Concept, directing & costumes by Essi Kausalainen
Malmö ensemble: G: Johanna Kalliokulju, Bee: Florian Feigl, MA: Marja Ahti, Washing machine / Worm / Stream: Yuko Takeda, Cello: Henning Fredriksson, Harp & stream: Ingrid Larsson, Stream: Edith Glader
Rønnebæksholm ensemble: G: Johanna Kalliokulju, Bee: Florian Feigl, MA: Marja Ahti, Washing machine / Worm / Stream: Yuko Takeda, Cello: Henning Fredriksson, Harp & stream: Ingrid Larsson, Stream: Naestved elementary school class
Helsinki ensemble: G: Johanna Kalliokulju, Bee: Florian Feigl, MA: Marja Ahti, Washing machine / Worm / Stream: Yuko Takeda, Stream: Ahti Leppänen, Villa Ruscica, Etna Ruscica, Cello: Aino Juutilainen, Harp: Saara Olarte
In cooperation with Inter Arts Center, Kiasma Theater, Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm, Inkonst and Moderna Museet Malmö.
Video excerpt from Kiasma, August 8th 202
Shrine (Still Life With Glass Bottle, Flower and Microphone) (track from Still Lives, 2021)
“Still Lives” is the third solo full length by the Finnish composer Marja Ahti, following a pair of releases on the Hallow Ground imprint. As a collection, it may be seen as a series of studies on the liminality of the listening act and an investigation into the physicality of sound. Ahti forges vivid electroacoustic environments from field recordings, analog synthesizers, acoustic feedback, magnetic tape and digital processing, resulting in a set of articulate, prickly, and surprising compositions. In the artist’s words, “These pieces could be conceived of as vanitas paintings of a kind – selections of mundane or archetypal objects, sounds that have their own distinct qualities, but exist only by virtue of being temporary events. From another angle, one could think of them as shrines – objects assembled and set in a particular relationship to each other, charging each other in their given constellations.”