The final room of the More Than Human exhibition, currently at London’s Design Museum, contains seven costume-like sculptures. Made from sheets of kelp, dried, stitched and stretched over rattan frames, they hang from the ceiling with the air of ceremonial robes or headdresses. This convocation of undersea elders draws you into the centre of its circle. Overhead, a speaker plays the sucking, popping, bubbling sounds of seaweed moving with the tide. One of the figures tilts its tubular, algal exoskeleton towards you, like a mouth or a giant, singular eye. It’s not clear, looking into this circular void, whether you are being invited into the debate or are the subject of it.
The work is Kelp Council, a collaboration between the German artist Julia Lohman and the Finnish composer Ville Aslak Raasakka. Like other objects in the exhibition, it seeks to open lines of communication between humans and other species, yet it acknowledges that no such conversation can ever be simple, or wholly innocent.
Photo Credit: Quiet Outi Törmälä
For the last decade, Raasakka has turned his own attention, unblinking, towards the deprivations of human activity upon the world. In 2015, his piano concerto Hypermarket and Hypercommodity considered the social implications of consumerism, using his orchestra to create ‘hyper-realistic’ representations of the sounds of factories, construction sites and other industrial spaces. The following year, he looked specifically at the impacts of organic and fossil fuels in Coal Power Station, for flute, clarinet, cello and electronics. For his doctoral project at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, he brought together twelve compositions on this theme, under the heading Coal, Wood, Oil.
In certain works, Raasakka’s focus is on catastrophic moments of destruction: the logging of Finnish old-growth forests (The Harvest, 2022); the inextinguishable coal mine fire that has been burning under the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, since 1962 (Black cloud, under ground, 2019); the Greenpoint oil spill in Brooklyn, New York, the largest oil spill in US history (Oil sheen on a river surface, 2022). In others, he creates studies on the sounds of extraction and consumption (Oil Rig, 2020). Almost all of them use field recordings as a basis for their musical material, which Raasakka slows down, processes and transcribes in order to give them musical substance. Occasionally, allusions to historical music become caught in the filter – flotsam of human beauty in the whirlpool of human destruction. And so, buried deep within Black ground, under ground, are echoes of Bartók and Debussy; in the monodrama Steam Engine (2022), recordings of eighteenth-century coal-powered machines combine with Handel to highlight the origins of the climate crisis in the era of Messiah and the high Baroque.
Photo Credit: Quiet Outi Törmälä
But as well as the sounds of machinery, Raasakka is also interested – as in his collaboration with Lohman on Kelp Council – in the sounds of nature itself. An early example, A natural habitat I for two violins (2014), is based on recorded primate sounds. More recently, he has turned to the sounds of invertebrates (the accordion concerto Weary insects in the wind, 2021) and trees (Bark, 2020). This interest in bioacoustics will be furthered in his hcmf// world premiere, The trees are talking, for string quartet and electronics, to be performed by the Mivos Quartet as part of the festival’s opening weekend.
Raasakka is keen not to offer pat conclusions or preach to the converted. His aim instead is to make the sounds of these environments and organisms – the languages of drilling and burning, as well as of moss and microbes – immersively and unavoidably present within the concert hall. It is up to us to join the conversation.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Tickets for Mivos’s performance of Ville Aslak Raasakka’s The Trees are Talking and full hcmf// 2025 programme now on sale here.