Ville Aalto
Avian Electronics II
Avian Electronics II is the second album by finnish sound artist and electronic musician Ville Aalto. The album is a follow-up to Avian Electronics (2020), which was nominated for the 2022 Teosto prize, one of the most noteworthy music prizes in the Nordics. Avian Electronics II will be released 7.7.2023.
The album is an experimental hybrid of sound art and electronic music. The focus is on artificial nature sounds created via various methods of sound synthesis. Digital insects stridulate, synthetic songbirds sing amidst static masses of electronic sound. In an increasingly technological world the division between real and artificial is called into question.
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Thematically the album touches on the history of life on earth, the noise pollution of the anthropocene and the uncertain future of the currently extant species on earth. Mimicking the ongoing cycle of biodiversity peaks and mass extinctions, the album is a seamless 50-minute track divided into three parts.
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Download full album as a zip file
or as separate tracks:
Scene II – Generations.wav
Scene III – Noise Cancellation.wav
Scene IV – Fast Forward.wav
Streaming links
Scenes I & V
In addition to the main album there are two additional tracks that will be released - Scene I before the album (released 30.6.2023) and Scene V after it (to be released winter 2023). They function as a prologue and epilogue to the album. The complete structure is as follows:
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Prologue
Scene I - The Beginning and the End
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Avian Electronics II
Scene II - Generations
Scene III - Noise Cancellation
Scene IV - New Lifeforms
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Epilogue
Scene V - Go Back to Scene I
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Ville Aalto
Ville Aalto is a sound artist and electronic musician from Vantaa, Finland. His artistic practice revolves around creating synthesized imitations of natural sounds / soundscapes. Combining these artificial nature sounds with electronic music, he creates immersive surround sound installations, concerts and albums of electronic music / sound art.
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While drawing from ecological and biological themes, Aalto limits his usage of sound strictly to electronically generated tones, eschewing samples and field recordings. This simple, almost banal approach, sets strict limits on artistic expression, becoming more and more interesting the deeper it is explored. Most often using sound as the only material in his works, Aalto hopes to emphasize the importance of focused, uninterrupted listening.
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Aalto’s aural worlds of artificial nature sounds and minimalistic electronic music evoke images of accelerating technological advancement, a changing and suffering environment, uncertain futures – and the possible forms of beauty in such futures that we may still find hard to imagine in the present.
Aalto launched Avian Electronics, a series of sound art works, in 2020. Since then, 9 surround sound installations, several concerts, one radio essay and two albums have been produced for the series. The work is ongoing with multiple concerts and installations coming up in 2023.
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Click image to download hi-res version.
Photo credit: Aleksi Hornborg
