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Johanna Elina Sulkunen creates a space for marginalized voices on final album in trilogy With the album "Coexistense", the adventurous Finnish musician completes her remarkable Sonority trilogy - and invites us all to listen to other voices in search of a common humanity Johanna Elina Sulkunen has demonstrated the power of her voice in numerous contexts. Both in the experimental vocal ensemble IKI and in various collaborations with names such as Tomasz Stanko, Axel Dörner and Koichi Makigami, the Copenhagen-based Finnish vocalist has gained recognition as an expressive and exploratory voice that moves fluidly between jazz, electroacoustic composition and avant- garde. It therefore came as no surprise that the exploration of the voice was a key element when she launched her solo project Sonority in 2018 with the album "Koan". It was also the first step in an ambitious album trilogy that is now completed with "Coexistence", which will be released on May 24th. What would you say if the whole world was listening? Where "Koan" and the subsequent "Terra" (2021) have emerged as meditative explorations of Sulkunen's own voice and body in relation to ambient soundscapes and field recordings, "Coexistence" invites us to listen to other people's voices in search of connection and community. "Can we, by listening, learn to think differently?" was a fundamental question that Sulkunen asked herself as she embarked on the album. She reflected on the power relations and social hierarchies that are also embedded in the human voice. Although the voice is seemingly a common human condition that can bind us together, some voices take a lot of space in society, while others are marginalized or even silenced. For Sulkunen, who has spent several years working with his own voice, a natural need to listen arose - as a musical as well as a human practice. The 11 compositions that make up "Coexistence" have grown out of conversations and interviews with people who can be said to be socially marginalized to one degree or another. Sulkunen has spoken to refugees and homeless people, among others, and rather than approaching them as a classic objective journalist, she has created a space for conversation through the open question: "What would you say if the whole world was listening?" From the conversations, a web of themes has emerged, about home and homelessness, borders and borderlessness, but also about happiness, dreams and visions for the world we inhabit. A mosaic of voices The many meetings and conversations have not only helped to define the themes of the album, but fragments of the conversations are also used as concrete musical material. With her well-known sense of complex soundscapes and experimental musical approach, Sulkunen unfolds a poignant mosaic of human voices and stories on "Coexistence", and with an almost anthropological curiosity she uncovers power relations and fragile human relationships. "Coexistence" offers no easy morality, but through its insistence on the necessity of listening to voices that are otherwise often silenced, the album is nevertheless imbued with a desire to create a common human space, a meeting place with room to both express one's own voice and listen to others. It's a powerful and relevant conclusion to Sulkunen's ambitious Sonority trilogy, and an album that adds significant aspects to her journey through the human voice as something that is at once deeply personal and something that connects us as humans.

Koan

Terra

Mit debutalbum Kunsten at kunne leve igen er et konceptalbum om rejsen tilbage til livet. En rejse, der begyndte for over 10 år siden, da jeg som kronisk syg, gennemgik livsnødvendige operationer, og stod ansigt til ansigt med døden. Et album om langsomt at lære sig selv, kroppen, og livet at kende igen. Om kærligheden, håbet og hvad det egentlig vil sige at leve, ikke bare overleve. At være til stede i nuet.

These last days of school before graduation are special, golden. It felt like an eternity getting here but then it all slips away, like a withered bloom. But not so fast! We're gonna fight for every last glint of sunshine on this mountaintop, shouting our love for one another, as we hold hands and jump!

Thomas and I have been singing together since 2017. There's a kind of trust that builds between two voices over that much time, something unspoken that you can't manufacture in a studio in an afternoon. In 2018 we went to Karmacrew Studio on the island of Møn with nothing prepared. No material, no plan, no other sound sources. Just two voices in a room, and whatever happened between them. What came out was Voicescapes. I've always believed that the voice carries more than sound. It carries memory, breath, attention, the particular weight of another person listening back at you. Thomas sings from that place. His baritone and my extended techniques don't compete, they find each other. Ten tracks, each named for what it does: Floating, Longing, Blessing, Hide. The titles came after, but they were always already there in the music. Jan Granlie wrote in Salt Peanuts that if you want to hear something genuinely new in the vocal world, you need to sit down with this album. That you won't find vocal art like this every day. That felt true to me. Not because I made it, but because Thomas was there too. Voicescapes came out January 22, 2021 on Chant Records, on CD, LP and digital.

Christian and I have been building a language together for years now. Shadow Moves is where that language finally has its own gravity. This is our second album, and where Head¨Space felt like a discovery, this feels like a territory we now know how to inhabit. Extended vocal techniques, prepared grand piano, live electronics woven through everything. The acoustic and the abstract in constant conversation. Sometimes lush, sometimes raw, always moving toward something just beyond the edge of what either of us could reach alone. I'm drawn to the places where sound loses its origin, where you can no longer tell what is voice and what is piano and what is the space between them. That's where Shadow Moves lives. Intergalactic was the word that kept coming up. Not as a metaphor but as a physical sensation, the feeling of drifting where time dissolves and gravity stops being relevant. We were thinking about Tanizaki while we made this. In Praise of Shadows. Stillness. Space. Slowness. The beauty of what recedes into darkness rather than stepping into light. It shaped how we listened to each other, and how we hope you'll listen too. One reviewer put it this way: he started playing it at 5am in Vancouver as a meditative ritual before the day began. That's exactly where this music wants to be found.