In October Oblivia and Liisa Pentti +Co celebrated both companies 21 years with performances and symposium under the umbrella Together in the Universe of Sound in Maunula-talo in Helsinki. On Friday the 29th of October 2021 we spent the day discussing aspects of working together within music, performance and choreography.
We listened to talks of collaboration by Libero Mureddo, NAF and Iñigo Giner Miranda. We had artist dialogues with Yiran Zhao and Essi Kausalainen, Rachel McIntosh and me, Liisa Pentti and Patrick Kosk, in one of these moments when you felt the wings of history sweeping through the room while they told us about personal encounters with key figures from the history of electronic music. In between we experienced two meditative pieces by Yiran Zhao, had soup and the delicious cinnamon rolls of Maunula talo. After this intelligent and vibrant day, we walked out in the autumnal dusk filled with joy of thinking together and of the brilliant inputs by our guests.
The next day was dedicated to performances. The historical event of the Birthday Impro by Pentti & Tudeer. Historical, because we had never performed together before, but known each other for 35 years. The cool durational performance by Magnus Logi Kristinsson (the first picture) and our friends from Stuttgart, NAFs amazing journey Norm is F!ction # 5.3 with 392, the 6 meter instrument containing all performances in the series that had preceded this event. A dancing party wrapped up the days with Paradox Box flying ostrichs, djs Liisa & Annika and old friends L’Arse & MC Testo P.
In this blog (December issue) we have two email interviews that are giving resonance to some of the inputs from the symposium, one with composer and pianist Iñigo Giner Miranda and the other with singers Rachel MacIntosh and Hannah Mehler. We are happy to share this with you and we are happy to announce that the exploration of working together in music, movement and performance under the umbrella of Together in the Universe of Sound will continue.
