With Judith coming from an instrumental practice into working with recordings and Marja bringing instrumental sound into a material recording space, how do you see the overlap between these two approaches?

Judith Hamann: It’s been a very beautiful process for me, this ongoing work with Marja as my practice has shifted into working more and more with recordings.

When we began working on Portals, a lot of my making was still very much focused on things that live in, or emerge from performed space, but that had already started to change. Meeting each other ‘halfway’ in some sense for me – responding with cello often, but also weaving field recordings into the work if I heard something that resonated with what Marja had sent – offered a sort of sense of permission to expand how I might meet her in this space.

Marja’s work is so, so beautiful, each sound treated with such care, and I feel I have also learned so much by listening ‘with’ Marja across this project. Shared listening offers such a particular place for connection and intimacy, for solidarity or vulnerability.

Marja Ahti: My work has always involved some instrumental sounds, but I’ve usually approached them in the same way as any other sound, more as living material than as ‘playing music’. The challenge for me was therefore not so much to meet the quality of instrumental sound than as to make space for more complex playing, give impulses to react to and then hold back, rather to see how it leads to what comes next than adding more layers.

It’s also been an intimate experience to meet Judith’s field recordings. You learn something about a person when you listen in to their listening to their environment and life events. A learning that is more about sharing than about knowing.

I am in conversation with Noémi Büchi right now, who is about to release her impressive debut album on -Ous. She said that "Music gives us the illusion that time is not time, but space. It is then that the music transforms from process to object, which I find a very interesting thought; a materialisation of the sound process. Sound is matter." Since I really appreciate your work with sound, I was wondering what your take on that is. Do you see sound as different from paint on a canvas, for example, or similar?

Marja Ahti: I can’t say that I fully understand what space and time actually are, though thinking about it is a very interesting rabbit hole.

But I’m especially interested in an embodied sense of space and time - a living experience rather than space and time as abstract concepts or measured units. In this sense, I don't think it's possible to separate time and space. The flow we are in every day is space-time, this limitless stretching and contracting web of being. Sound happens in you, in space-time, as you are space-time. It's the same with music as with looking at colour or touching a surface. The body-mind assembles it into something coherent. It all happens at the natural speed of biological life in its vast interconnected space.

To me, with this in mind, music is not about creating an illusion, but rather about investigating what is, working with perception experientially.

Judith Hamann: These are such sticky spaces to think in, and I suppose this idea of sound as transforming from process to object is quite interesting to me, as I attempt to consider it (more often than not), as a subject: something active.

I think there are ways to consider the materiality of sound without necessarily rendering it into a fixed form or object in order to give it the implied necessity of weight or structure in order to consider it in certain ways. There’s this lovely passage in Muñoz’s ‘Cruising Utopia’ that discusses the materiality of, and raises questions about the material residue of dance (and also in some sense performance), which I often return to, this line: “the ephemeral is material.”

I wonder if it’s possible to consider these questions without the ballast of an object? I ask this because I’m also very much interested in the materiality of process, but without necessarily an outcome, or object(ive). My work lives a lot in that alive space of process, and a general reluctance to necessarily ‘fix’ anything (although I am getting better at completing records!). I sort of prefer to think about realisations, performances, even records perhaps – as specific iterations of an ongoing activity.

Many sound artists believe that there are no boundaries or rules when it comes to sound. But Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, in Solfege of the Musical Object, actually rather saw a connection with classical composition. Would you say there are certain rules we can apply to sound, similar to how there are certain rules for melody and harmony? What role do these play, for example, for Portals and A coincidence is perfect, intimate attunement?

Marja Ahti: Over the years I’ve made up my own strategies for working with sound. I like to let the sounds take the lead, let their properties as I perceive them nudge me towards the next action. Responding to Judith’s recordings has worked amazingly well within this framework, like a very slow improvisation, with each other, with places, with the seasons.

I find it more useful to think in terms of tools and discourse than rules and boundaries. One way to look at it is the drive towards investigation on one hand - doing away with categories, facing the endless open of sound - and music's innate tendency towards stabilising the world on the other hand - re-organizing it, putting it into order through form and structure, through ritual and community.

I’m interested in how we can transcend the contradiction between these and accept them as aspects of practice that are actually supporting each other.

Judith Hamann: Rules are an interesting marker of a boundary to apply to this kind of music especially. I tend to be sort of resistant to imposed structures that are applied externally to sounds, as opposed  to letting them reveal their own desires, or logics just by spending time with them.

I think perhaps the tendency towards creating these sort of systems in concréte musics by these French artists at that particular moment, was driven by a kind of logic of articulating lineage in european compositional and academic thinking: that something must contain a kind of tracing of position, and that in order to find a location canonically, it must reference another european thinker/composer, or methodology in order to be ‘legitimate.’

In terms of this group of French artists, I’ve always been more of a Luc Ferrari stan, and have found a great deal to respond to and/or pivot away from in his ideas around anecdotal music.

But didn’t Pierre Schaeffer say towards the end of his life that all these euro-classical music systems imposed on sound were essentially a mistake as well?

Many of the questions at the outset of your project are not just related to making music, but also to listening to it. How much time do you actually find for this – and how important is it to set aside some time for it regularly?

Marja Ahti: I don’t think I could make music without listening to music. As I love listening to music, I don’t consider it as time set aside from something else. Being curious about sound, about music, about people, about all kinds of things - that’s where my inspiration is coming from.

Judith Hamann: Listening, not just to music but also just to everything I hear as a move through a day is, I think, deeply intertwined with how I also make music. Coming often from a sort of iterative, performance based approach to how I assemble sounds even when they’re not connected to an instrument is also definitely a listening practice.

That said, listening to music during my ‘cooking hours’ is something I particularly love to do, even more so when it’s with other people and becomes a space for sharing.