This digital EP features the music from Hanna Tuulikki's audiovisual installation Under Forest Cover | Metsänpeiton Alla, remixed for stereo sound.
Commissioned for Helsinki Biennial 2021, in this new work, Tuulikki explores the Finnish folkloric concept of being caught in metsänpeitto (forest cover), an enchanted forest landscape where places become unfamiliar and everything moves in reverse. Traditionally used to describe when people went missing in the forest, metsänpeitto is used by Hanna Tuulikki as a contemporary metaphor for the emotional trauma that comes with ecological awareness.
Installed in an underground bunker on Vallisaari island in Helsinki’s archipelago, the place-responsive installation consists of silver birch tree trunks, tree bark floor cover, surround sound audio and a digital choreography that floats in the space like a hologram.
The sound features a vocal improvisation based on traditional Finnish cow calling songs recorded on Tuulikki’s now derelict family farm in Northern Savonia in Eastern Finland. Using a high-pitched vocal technique to carry over long distances, the calls animate the echo of the surrounding forest plantation and interact musically with the various bird life. Mixed for five-channel surround sound, the composition moves forwards and backwards, stretching and slowing down time. Emerging from a mist of sonic interference, a voice can be heard calling in Finnish: “Come back! Come back home! Come!”
Performed backwards and then reversed in the film edit, the accompanying digital choreography is projected as a hologram. Limb by limb, a disembodied apparition appears slowly, crawling and searching in the dark, through glitches, anxiety and dissociation. Repetitive gestures recall the folkloric instructions said to help the one lost in forest cover find their way.
The sound and choreography culminates in a song of sorrow inspired by the Finnish-Karelian-Ingrian tradition of singing your troubles to the trees. In this backwards English incantation, ecological grief is obscured by language.
There’s a Finnish saying “The forest will answer in the way you call to it” – a lesson of cause and effect. It teaches that the things we do have consequences. Echoes bounce back; what goes around, comes around. Can we ever find our way?
In the folklore, the way out of forest cover is not through thinking, but through feeling with the body, through shifting perspective. In this weird exploration of dark ecology, Tuulikki suggests that before we can begin this process of feeling our way, we first have to recognise the deceptive appearance of forest cover. Perhaps, if we listen carefully, we will hear an echo through the trees...
More info here:
helsinkibiennaali.fi/en/artist/hanna-tuulikki/
released September 28, 2021
Vocal improvisation & composition by Hanna Tuulikki
Location sound recorded by Pete Smith
Backwards song composed & recorded by Hanna Tuulikki
Surround sound mixed by Pete Smith
Dramaturgy by Peter McMaster
Remixed for stereo sound by Pete Smith