Tsembla is the solo moniker of the Finnish artist Marja Ahti, and on May 25th she will release her fourth full-length The Hole In The Landscape via NNA Tapes. Based out of the coastal town of Turku, the musician is a frequent collaborator with the musical collective Kemialliset Ystävät, and one half of the electro-acoustic duo Ahti & Ahti. Under her solo guise, the musician uses electronics and treated samples of acoustic instruments, objects, voices, and field recordings to create textural tapestries of drifting sound, melody, and rhythm.
The Hole In The Landscape takes it’s thematic inspiration from geological processes, contrasting these long-form organic developments with the more fleeting temporal scale of human existence. Imagine the large stone structures of Arches National Park in Utah, where sandstone formations have been hollowed over time by wind and rain, or, at the human level, the sense of collective and personal loss that we feel after a heartbreaking tragedy or the death of a loved one. All of these occurrences point to an absence, and yet that absence is surrounded by a sustained presence–or maybe this presence is surrounded by a sustained absence. Tsembla embodies these contrasting terms with compositional structures that move between negative space and intensely detailed and layered musical happenings.
“Gravitating Bones” opens Ahti’s upcoming 8-track collection, and it’s exquisite sense of drift always seems to develop according to its own organic logic. Combining a host of almost placeable sounds like strings and piano with gurgling and bleating cosmic ambiance, the track moves between haunting passages of drone, cryptic musical occurrence, and nearly silent quiet. The effect is spellbinding, and akin to the kind of immersive listen that can happen as one takes in a landscape panorama with rapt attention. The video for “Gravitating Bones” was directed by Leah Beeferman, and it echoes Tsembla’s organic preoccupations with scenes of rippling waves and oceanside views. Beeferman often overlays these scenes with oval shapes to depict the musician’s titular holes, ultimately creating landscapes that are both natural and synthetically affected.
