In the late summer of 2018, I temporarily relocated to Berlin, furthering my interest in intertwining environmental sounds and improvisation.

I spent my early days getting a sense of place by following peaceful canal paths and navigating hidden hinterhauses, re-mapping my bearings away from the cars and traffic.

Soon I was drawn into the calm soundscapes of the Landwehr Canal in Neukölln – listening to the nuanced and distinct sounds – birdsong, echoes of a distant dog bark, rustling leaves, brief conversations heard here and there.

In the opening track, I recorded footsteps and the ambience of the forest from my walk to Friedhof Grunewald-Forst cemetery, where Nico, the German singer and model, is buried.

The music in this album is based around guitar improvisations and responds to those subtle environmental recordings and walks, merging the two into a hybrid form of harmonics, rhythms and atmospheres.

- Petri Huurinainen 2023

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A delicate cluster of harmonics too fragile to be played in public, Petri Huurinainen’s latest recording embodies from the start a conceptual and hauntological proceduralism that perhaps owes as much to Burroughs’ cut-up tape experiments as Fisher’s post-capitalist unpacking of Derrida. One which switches time frames, questioning whether there is a where without a when, or a when without a where. Interrogating the space between recording and playback.

Here and now, as then, the coordinates for this psychogeographic procedure are the Landwehr canal in Berlin. Some time before these notes and half notes skittered across the frets fragments of conversation are heard. In English. German. There is birdsong. The birdsong is incessant. Now, the unmistakable too close slither of a bicycle wheel. The purposeful tread of a passing jogger. Cries and whispers. Amidst these forgotten vectors, how is the listener to distinguish the exotic from the banal? Past from present? The specific from the generic?

The circumstances of this music are three years in the making, both pre and post pandemic. The improvisation is played back and re-recorded at the location that inspired it. An occult process, in the sense that it is quite literally an occlusion. A palimpsest. 2019-2022. There and then, here and now. An interregnum. What changes? The clusters grow surreptitiously to a drone. A dog barks. A pigeon takes flight. Children are playing. In this time span entire narratives have been played out, yet remain unknown. Love affairs come and gone. Endings and beginnings. Births and deaths.

The field recording provides an apparent cue for an accretion of sonic texture swelling to a crescendo, accomplished with absolute minimalism and restraint, if not stricture. Feedback. An act, then, of reverie - only completed by playback and re-recording in situ. An echo of an echo. An abstraction eliding sign and referent. The fading wake of a flock of swans gliding through the black water. Absence and description.

-David Selden 2022