News/posts

Hi everyone!  Does anyone want to come to the west coast of Finland and wander around petrol stations for a few hours, picking up various random objects on the way, and then building narratives and histories around them? 

I totally copped out on a title, but Yet -unnamed explorations is Wednesday the 23rd of October, and part of the fascianting Experimental Event ...

It's really, really cold here right now. Here being Tallinn, Estonia, where as I write it's currently -22 C (-7.6 F) and it "feels like" -33 C (-27.4 F) with the wind chill. I'm sitting here in Slothrop's trying to stay alive, for the feeble electric heating can't keep up with the brutality of an Estonian winter. Thank you, medieval architecture!

But that's...

If you're in Tallinn, please stop by Slothrop's on Müürivahe 19.  You'll find a large selection of secondhand books in English - literature, history, art, politics, essays, criticism -- the works.  Slothrop's is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 18, Eastern European Time.  Soon we'll hopefully have a (carefully-curated) selection of...

Dispatches from a website I do a piss-poor job of keeping up-to-date:

•  I've been based in or around Tallinn for one year now.  Ptarmigan I can say has been going well; it's been an amazing thing and it's more momentum than inertia here.  We've had too much going on to fully talk about here, as we've had something like 80 events since April, but there's lots in the works for 2012,...

I'm going to perform solo/live for the first time in ages, as Oakwhistle again.  It's at the Soodevahe festival in Tallinn on the 17th of this month.  Expect something along the vibe of the Boat Trip LP only maybe sloppier - but (un)focused around hesitation, delicacy, and misguided stabs at beauty.

I've entered the world of 'published author' with my essay 'Everything is Tentative and Possible', which describes the experience of co-founding Ptarmigan in Helsinki from 2009 until the opening of the Tallinn space.  It's published by the lovely Mount Analogue press/curatorial platform in Stockholm, and is part of a book that deals with self-organised, non-profit art initiatives with...

Next month I will be coordinating a workshop entitled Miscellaneous expertise: performance, unlearning stories and public speech at the MoKS Kunsti ja Sotsiaalpraktika Keskus AVAMAA sympsium in Mooste, Estonia.  This is a collaboration with my good friend Giles Bailey, and the workshop will take place over five days with the dissemination on the sixth.

We proposed Miscellaneous...

Ptarmigan was funded by The Nordic Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture administrated by the Nordic Culture Point!  We will be able to offer three 2-month residencies in 2010 to residents of the Nordic and Baltic countries (outside of Finland).


In true Ptarmigan fashion, we are interested in people who do similar things to what we do.  So while we are looking for artists and cultural...

Here's the end of our set from Ptarmigan last weekend, performing the song 'Talbot' which is actually not on the 15,000 Day Boat Trip LP (available very very soon from 8mm!) but a song from my project Handshake Garden.  Blurring the lines, you know.... Please accept my apologies for how awkward it is to watch someone sing and play viola at the same time.  More live shows (with...

I will be performing twice this month in Helsinki.

First, Friday 6 November at Kokoteatteri (Krunnunhaka), as part of Helsinki Meeting Point.  I will be playing esraj along with James Andean (piano and electronics) and three dancers (Riikka Theresa Innanen, Jaakko Simola, and Virva Talonen).  More information here.

On Saturday 21 November I will be performing as "The 15,000 Day Boat...

Ikuisuus has just released a split casette between Last Night on Earth and New Yaki.



I appear on the Last Night on Earth side playing esraj, along with Jani Hirvonen, Mari Imppola and Jari Koho.  This was recorded ages ago after I just moved to Finland and was probably the first time I had played with anyone in months.  I haven't heard the recording in awhile but it is available for...

This site runs a custom-built content management system that I wrote when I was teaching myself Rails.  As it was a learning project, the code was full of bugs and suffered from generally poor design.  This afternoon I ripped out the guts and bashed out some new code, essentially from scratch.  The goal is reduce the ridiculous number of 500 errors that was occuring because I was...

Here's the video from the most recent Bat Tarbet performance, last Sunday at Koko-Teatteri in Helsinki.  Thanks to Juho Jouhtimäki for shooting and sharing this.

Bat Tarbet "noses" from last week. We'll be performing again at Kokoteattri in Kruunuhaka, Helsinki on the 15th of March with the Shitty Listeners.