I’m very glad that I was asked to perform a Forces set at the amazing Drifts festival!

https://www.drifts.art/program-2023

This is the third iteration of Drifts and I had so much fun last year.

I think this year has a loaded lineup and I’m planning a completely new set for the festival.

Here’s my text about the performance:

For the Drifts festival Forces will make a special set utilizing the early 00s groovebox E-mu Xtreme Lead-1 as a main sound source. The performance will explore the contingencies of the SuperCollider programming language together with the Rave inspired presets of the E-mu synthesizer/drum machine.

The utopian qualities of Rave music will meet the chaos of algorithmically triggered MIDI events. The theme of Ungoverned Lives is reflected aurally; from the collapsing and unstable structures new kinds of possibilities will arise.

My set time is at 17 next Saturday (30th of September) at the Energy Hall of Museum of Techonology.

It’s a pretty unique place for a festival so looking really forward. Among the other artist playing are bela, AGF, Amnesia Scanner, Kaino Wennerstrand & Murrettumeri, An Tul and nkisi!

My new Forces record Chim​æ​ras is released! It came out just yesterday on the awesome slovakian label mappa

you can listen it here:
https://mappa.bandcamp.com/album/chim-ras

or from the embedded:

About the album:

I recorded it about one year and two months ago at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm where I was having a longer six weeks residency. Back then, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing there. Every day I went to the studio, and was just doing these strange jams, mostly using the forgotten hardware rack synths of the 90s and SuperCollider audio & MIDI manipulations + a few Serge and Buchla modular jams as well.

When I came back home from the residency, I started cutting-pasting those different recordings together. I tried to form tracks which would have two-or-three very different tonalities, but having some kind of inherent – but weird – logic. The topic of a chimera came quickly to mind and I decided that the whole album should be comprised of sonic chimeras.

At that time I was also reading about one of the Black-something named companies (Blackstone?), which is a huge company doing plenty of different things, and also a weapon manufacturer. I started to think about how different mega-corporations can have these chimeric limbs – each limb operating in vastly different fields, some extra sinister and some more normal household-items, and how those firms can easily hide their true nature. The tracks are named after mythological chimeras and these arms manufacturers.

I guess that’s most what I want to say about the album:)

Huge thanks to Jakub of Mappa of taking care of everything! ❤ Really love the work Jakub is doing with the label.

Also thanks to marutonkun for the rad cover, Adam Badí Donoval for mastering and Tristan Bath for the album text at Bandcamp!

I have a new Forces album coming out soon on the amazing mappa! The pre-order is out now (with few premiere tracks). I’ll post more about it when the actual album comes out.🙂

Forces – Chim​æ​ras
https://mappa.bandcamp.com/album/chim-ras
Pre-order, cassette, digital
Out August 10, 2023

Named after the mythological hybrid of the chimaera, Forces’ first collection for mappa was put together in a similar fashion. The sounds all stem from a fruitful residency at Stockholm’s EMS Elektronmusikstudion in May & June 2022, leading to a bounty of source material with which to build. The sounds and concept are equally chimeric, stringing together disparate and unintuitive jams, the music mimicking the multi-limbed, sewn together beasts of both creative open source coding and destructive multinational concerns who hide their cores amid endless appendages. Like Doctor Moreau, Forces – aka Finnish artist Joonas Siren – weaves wildly varying attributes into something new, from short-circuiting 8-bit dream ambience to fractured digital groans, drones, and noisy freakouts.

Recorded, coded, composed, performed & mixed by Forces (Joonas Siren)

Recorded at EMS Stockholm, June 2022, with the digital synths of the “90’s wagon” synth rack, and the SuperCollider programming language
Artwork by Marutonkun
Mastered by Adam Badí Donoval
Words by Tristan Bath
Photography by Zoltan Czakó
Released by mappa as MAP039 in 2023

I’m playing at MeetFactory in Prague next Monday 12th of June as Forces! After my set is the renown Polish composers Aleksandra Słyż‘s new performance “Primal Rituals”.

Super happy to go and this is my second gig actually in Prague after one in Punctum last year organized by the lovely folk of Genot Centre.

I probably will play a mixture of old and new stuff. Pretty hectic as usual. Come if you are around!:)

I’m sometimes available for commission for other artists (for coding based work, sound work, interactivity and video editing), and last March -23 I did a lot of different things in a big Marko Vuokola’s exhibition in Taidehalli called “Ocean of Love”.

I actually did two different coding based works with Processing language. Firstly I did a 7 large LCD screens + Raspberry Pi / Processing called “RGB 7 x 1677716” which was based on never-ending generative flow of large color fields (RGB 256*256*256) changing randomly after 10 seconds.

I also did some sound editing, an another Processing based animation and a large time-lapse photography video/animation project called “2 x 69076”, which was series of photography of a water glass, the water evaporating during a month. It was showed with a duplicate of itself but in a reverse direction, so it created a see-saw like effect of water evaporating / filling.

All and all, I really like working for Marko and working in a big institution like Taidehalli was actually super nice experience and the staff there are so welcoming and friendly!

Our exhibition “Two Million Seconds” was lucky enough to get mentioned (short review) in Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat by Sanna Lipponen.

You can read the article here (only in Finnish though):
https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000009496655.html

Here’s a quick and dirty translation though:

“The works of Juuso Noronkoski, Tuomo Rainio, and Joonas Siren are united by various digital and chemical processes. The joint exhibition of the three artists is minimalist but mind-bending. Sense of time disappears and simultaneously sharpens when traditional and new forms of photography, million-year-old water, and real-time computer graphics are presented.”

I realized that I haven’t done a proper post about the working grant I have received from Koneen Säätiö / Kone Foundation.

December 2021 I was incredibly lucky and I got funding for two years of working with my artistic practice. I mostly applied with working with the Forces alias but I also applied for other artistic practices like internet and gallery based works.

Thanks to the grant board and the foundation, if they ever browse through my site! The grant really helps immensely as it gives a small respite of the constant grind of worrying how to survive and pay the rent. It really makes it possible to concentrate your on work so much more, so I’m grateful of this chance.

If you are interested reading my application, you should be able to find it from this search link:
https://koneensaatio.fi/tuetut/?search_key=joonas%20siren

I have been producing weird beats for the underground experimental rap star (and my dear friend!) Draama-Helmi since Helmi’s first record in 2015 and I’m incredible happy to announce that we won the prestige Teosto Prize this year!

The prize was for the the last Draama-Helmi album “Draama-Helmi kuistilla“. I made the beat for “Ennustus” track, you can hear the whole album from the embedded player! The production team for the record was: Helmi herself, Miikka Sipilä, Tuomas Närvä (tumoas), Jonna Karanka (Kuupuu), Toni Korpi (Kanttoripoika), Heikki Kivelä (Hex Viihde) and me (as Forces)!

The two other Teosto prize winners are Mikko Sarvanne Garden’s “Heräämisen valkea myrsky” album and Sanna Ahvenjärvi’s & Tapio Lappalainen’s compotisition “Water”. Both super cool as well!

Here’s the Helsingin Sanomat news article about Helmi’s work:
https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000009534310.html

and here’s my prize:)

I played a concert through my sound installation last Sunday 23rd of August ! As I had a 16-channel sound installation setup, it was pretty easy to also play a Forces gig through it. I approached the Äänen Lumo / Charm of Sound association and together we managed to get the great SuperCollider composer Marcin Pietruszewski to also to come and play through my system. I had a blast and also a nice turnover!

Small glimpse of the set, courtesy of Taras:

FB event link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1492331697963850

I have a new joint exhibition with two friends Juuso Noronkoski and Tuomo Rainio at Forum Box gallery. It’s called Kaksi miljoonaa sekuntia / Two Million Seconds and my piece there is a 16-channel generative sound installation called Kadonnut aika (Lost Time). The sound is controlled by parameters which are tied into the computer clock values, so time itself is changing the piece. I will post more about my piece in the future, but below you can read our general take about the themes of the exhibition. The exhibition is open Tue-Sun 12-17 until 30th of April, welcome!

“A joint exhibition by three artists at Forum Box explores the relativity and temporal asynchrony of different durations. The artists, who all work with different media, focus on the dialogue between material processes. Digital processes construct and deconstruct the image and stretch sound, while chemical processes shape photographic paper. Water, stored for millions of years, evaporates invisibly during the course of the exhibition, in about two million seconds.

A time series of three photographs by Juuso Noronkoski serves as an introduction to the exhibition. The building in the photographs is a reference to the visible world, a place, a city somewhere in the distance. As the fog thickens and moves in front of the building, the view becomes more abstract. The event continues elsewhere in Noronkoski’s photographic works, where the shadow of the window refers to the descent of the fog curtain, to the sun, and finally to the photographic image itself. In the artist’s studio, the sunlight has traveled to a piece of paper placed opposite the window. The frame of the window delineates an event in which the light itself becomes the image.

In Tuomo Rainio’s works, temporality and duration are expressed through the abstracted human figure and through the technology that explores the recording of light. The final work, a collaboration between Tuomo Rainio and Janne Pulkkinen, will be shown at the back of the exhibition space, where the technology developed for the work records light volumetrically – as a spatial mass. The video work focuses on light and its various manifestations as grainy noise, rays and curious clouds of fog. Where attention is usually focused on things in terms of the light they reflect, the work opens up perspectives on how light invisibly radiates through the air between things, objects and people.

In Joonas Siren’s work, sound progresses through Marcel Proust’s series of novels In Search of Lost Time. The temporal structure of the mammoth 148-hour audio book thickens and expands, while it spreads through the gallery space, pulsing through it, from room to room. Parameters tied to a computer clock shape the work, creating its own temporal structure. On a daily basis, the computer moves on to the next part of the book series and spreads its temporal reach, most often slowing down the time or speed of the narrated text.

What the works in the exhibition and the artistic thinking of the authors have in common is focusing attention on something seemingly empty and in-between, on individual sounds in the middle of words. At the same time, the works open up interpretations of the relationship between light and time, exploring the slowing down of their movement. The fog obscures the simple expression of the photograph and shifts the gaze on to the event itself. The passer-by takes a step, space-time bends and the granite underfoot passes 20 years in a blink of an eye. “

I recently had a gig at Free Art Space in Helsinki in last January, in an event called Noise Traffic. I had very good times there and the set turned out quite nice I think, so I decided to upload it to SoundCloud!

Played pretty abstract SuperCollider sound synthesis set using this live coding methodology called Node Proxy or Ndef, which allows you to do rapid changes to the material you are playing. It’s super fun for live use and I have been using it a lot recently for maybe a bit different stuff than my older more granular based methods. Take a listen!

LKS 20230215 Helmi Kajaste (neljäs vasemmalta) ja työryhmä musiikkialan Teosto-palkintoehdokkaiden julkistustilaisuudessa Helsingissä 15. helmikuuta 2023. LEHTIKUVA / ANTTI HÄMÄLÄINEN

After some pretty unexpected turns I seem to be one of the nominees for this year’s big Teosto Prize for being one of the producers for Draama-Helmi‘s (Helmi Kajaste) album Draama-Helmi Kuistilla. Teosto is the music composer copyright organization a bit like Germany’s GEMA but maybe not quite that extreme. Still feels pretty weird after being involved in Helsinki electronic music underground for more than 20 years and then suddenly get nominated for a famous prize. I wasn’t even a member of Teosto before and I had to join in to accept the nomination! xD

Helmi is a good a friend and I have made three beats for her so far. (if you are unaware of Helmi’s work, start with this music video!):

Among my other artistic endeavours, I’m part of an association which runs an yearly festival for experimental music and moving image called: SOLA. You can find more info about last years festivals in a few posts below. Part of the festival should have been a separate pre-festival club night that was unfortunately cancelled. It was cancelled as the workers of the venue (the Helsinki main library Oodi) were on strike, but we still managed to do the same night almost 8 months later the end of January. More info below!

https://solafestival.fi/Pre-festival-club-at-Oodi

SOLA Post-Festival Club

Originally this event should have been organized 4th of May 2022, but due to the Helsinki city workers strike it was cancelled. We will now have the exact same lineup at the same place Tue 24th of January 2023!

On Tuesday 24th of January we celebrate the previous SOLA festival with a free of charge program! The main festival took place at WHS Theater Union 13th-14th of May.

In Oodi will have a selected short films of the renowned Finnish experimental film maker Saara Ekström and a musical performance by Ilpo Numminen and a live-art performance by Minerva Juolahti.

Minerva Juolahti: erottuminen(–)

The performative gesture approaches the processes of differentiation and non-differentiation through body and space. The work explores how sound and image can create and disclose spaces, on the other hand make them fade out, blend into each other.

Esityksellinen ele lähestyy erottumisen sekä ei-erottumisen prosesseja kehollisuuden ja tilan kautta. Teos tutkii sitä, miten ääni ja kuva voivat toisaalta luoda ja tuoda esiin tiloja, toisaalta häivyttää niitä.

Ilpo Numminen

Synthhead Ilpo Numminen has been blasting socks off with his hypnotic cosmic comps for years now. Ilpo’s unabashed love for krautrock inflects his playful and decidedly spaced-out musiikkia, most notably on his latest release on the venerable Lal Lal Lal label lovably titled I Guess You Could Call This A Long Play. Ecstatic delights to warm even the coldest of continental hearts!

For Oodi library Ilpo will give a introduction how to use modular synthesizer as an instrument, an especially the hosted in one of the studios in the library. After the presentation we will hear a special set using only the Oodi library’s modular synthesizer!

Saara Ekström

Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Chronotopes where time and place densify, time that nurtures and erodes, the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are at the core of her art. Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010.

I haven’t played in Helsinki for a while, but I will tomorrow at the Noise Traffic event VTT / Free Art Space Vilhovuorenkuja 15! I will livecode some weird synthesis that I’ve been cooking this Winter/last Autumn. Maybe more abstract stuff this time.

Plenty of other acts as well!

https://www.facebook.com/events/1594102224377112

NOISE TRAFFIC
A collaboration between sensorium space and station of commons
14th January 2023

Vapaan Taiteen Tila / Vilhonvuorenkuja 15-16, 00500 Helsinki

‘The sonic flesh has no dermis, no skin, but inhabits
the possibility of the world with its own formless possibility’
– Salome Voegelin, 2019

Noise Traffic is an event hosting a plurality of voices from local and international artists, collectives, and art communities. Its aim is to promote artistic discourses and to discuss the political possibilities of sound, voice, and performance. Noise Traffic will take place on the 14th of January 2023 at Vapaan Taiteen Tila (Free Arts Space) in Helsinki and is the first one of an event series.

In ‘Noise Traffic’, sonic flesh is an immaterial membrane holding up a complexity of sequences, and exposes the semantic infrastructures of a given context and a place. In its capacity to inhabit it also mobilises and maps out societal dimensions which are often unheard. ‘Noise Traffic’ approaches the indeterminate possibilities of the sonic flesh and reinforces the complexity of sequences of those voices that are outside of any form of representation and provides them with a playground to create their own set of rules that exist, often, as an ‘other’ world within the existing world.

line up (in alphabetical order):
aetherlinna (CY/FI), Tytti Arola (FI), Ana Gutieszca (FI/MX), Forces (FI), GRM (FI/DE), Minerva Juolahti (FI), Androula Kafa (CY), Gregoire Rousseau (FI/FR), Emiddio Vasquez (CY/US), and Jukka Kääriäinen (FI).

Pop-up stands by Rab-Rab Press (https://www.rabrab.net/), and by record label Moneda (https://monedas.bandcamp.com/).

The event will be streamed live on Lumbung Radio https://lumbungradio.stationofcommons.org/
Doors open at 14:00

Entrance is free, with suggested donation of 5-10€

This is a crowdfunded event and all proceeds will go to the artists.

Keywords: noise, experimental, avant-garde, sound, performance art, happenings, lectures, podcasts, radio, bunker, bats, rituals, loops, electronics, computer noise, Finnish Folk, psychedelic, techno, jazz, improv, body-sculptures, press.

I have a new mix out (as Forces) on the Chilean label hIBRIDANITA. I played a lot of different computer music faves (Tom Mudd, LuisaMei, Carl Stone!) but also plenty of different kinds of electronic music like breakcore and even old school dubstep (Vex’d!). I actually livecoded the whole thing with SuperCollider, which was a fun challenge. Livecoding enabled me to do some on-the-fly editing on the tracks I was playing so for example Meat Loaf is completely destroyed x). Hope you enjoy!

Cover by: v3lo

Track list:
LuisaMei – pelikans-bak-bak
Mumdance & Logos – Proto
Kenji Kawai – Unnatural City
JºnΛs °lΣs∈n – {Systm32dll} {pd tonnage }.wav
ang3l_sp1der – ??
Olli Aarni – Flipperi uimahallin aulassa
Carl Stone – Wall Me Do
Pave Maijanen – Ikävä (Forces SinOsc.ar edit)
Atte Elias Kantonen – ??
Aamu Kuu – Vive La France (Hardcore Muzik)
Xanopticon – Psicicite
Dopplereffekt – Ulams Spiral
Tom Mudd – Scraper 3
Labradford – by Chris Johnston, Craig Markva, Jamie Evans,
General Magic & Pita – Spring Fridge +
Keiska – Pillow City
J. K. – A5 (Forces VOsc3.ar edit)
SOPHIE – UNISIL
Don Cherry – Bass Figure for Ballatune (Two Pianos and Three Piano Players)
Meat Loaf – Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are (Forces GrainBuf.ar edit)
Vex’d – Smart Bomb
Ben & Jerry – Cornerish E Gargle
Terrence Dixon – Beautiful Jerusalem
Murrettumeri – ??

Happy new year 2023!

I forgot to post this during early November, but as I’m part of the SHAPE+ roster until July, they asked me to curate (or so called take-over) of their Instagram channel for a week. Instead of just posting my own stuff, I actually decided to document many active members of the underground scene here in Helsinki. You can still check my documentation out by following the IG stories highlight link below. I did 10 different video recordings of different artist jamming/training (Olli Aarni, Atte Elias Kantonen, Erikoismies, M Lore Wingren, Murrettumeri, W, jacquoline, ohmudog, An Tul and ang3l_sp1der).

https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17906599466655492/

Hey all, finally had the time and energy to make a proper Forces Bandcamp page. I put all Forces records from different labels there, mainly just for the sake of convenience/streaming. If you are interested in buying the albums digitally, please still use the the different label websites. The only exceptions is the album Dynamics, which is also available at my page as Conditional records is sadly defunct.

https://ffforces.bandcamp.com/

I had a very nice (and tough!) interview with Lucia Udvardyova of SHAPE+ platform. You can read it below:

https://shapeplatform.eu/2022/horizon-of-possibility-an-interview-with-forces/

We discussed generally about my artistic practice, my recent EMS residency, livecoding and the themes of my recent record Inertia on Infinite Machine.

I’m happy to announce that I’m the artist of the week at SHAPE+ platform which also includes a takeover of their Instagram account. I keep posting different IG stories about my own work, but I also want to highlight the thriving underground scene here in Helsinki, so I try to post small snippets of local artist performing. So far I have filmed Erikoismies, M and jacqouline! Take a look at the IG account and except still more.

The Envelope Festival live streaming AV set now also on Youtube!

SuperCollider MIDI jams with mostly hardware stuff (Yamaha RM1x, Yamaha TG33, DSI Evolver desktop, Kurzweil K2000) + some SC SinOsc noises