Voices #37
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
karsino kuuni
answering some questions. We have already observed his experimental / lo-fi / electronic work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The section from “und die ganze welt sang mit mir…” that we prefer is “und die ganze welt sang mit mir (thank_you)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► karsino kuuni: I started working on this song in september of 2024, a few months after releasing my first album ‘people should get drunk, even if they are on fire…’. That album was my main musical focus for years, so in retrospect this song feels like a palette cleanser. I started by playing around with a sample of an old italian tv jingle from the 80s, not sure yet what I was going to make with it. After a while I just ended up slowing it down a bunch and looping it and then playing a couple of synth pads on top of it. For a while it stayed this way and went by the working title ‘Certified ambient classic’ (hopefully it will be just that one day in the future). As time went by I added some field recordings I had on my phone from times I’d been on planes and at airports. But it was still missing something.
That missing piece came on the 28th of december 2024 when I listened to the song in my DAW while dozing off and the phrase “nothing/everything in the world sang it with me” popped into my mind. I keep a journal for dreams and phrases heard in hypnagogic states from which I draw a lot of inspiration for my music. From that phrase came the name of the song (and the whole EP) “und die ganze Welt sang mit mir…” (german for ‘the whole world sang with me’). I started writing lyrics for the song which I later sang into audacity, recorded with my laptop microphone only. The concept had formed: climbing up and down the sky between time and space, revisiting your own past.
The EP started forming as I realized this song went together really well with two other ambient pieces I had made earlier but didn’t know what release they might fit on. Together they tell a story of living in the future with a new found confidence and then traveling back to the past, back to your lowest moment and saying one last goodbye to your childhood, then seeing yourself from a distance before returning back home. The EP works as a companion piece to the album released prior. Going over a lot of the same themes and events but rather looking at them retrospectively, instead of expressing something felt in the moment.
One last sample on this song, which I added as I put the EP together to create a transition between this and the next song, was from a noise session with my stylophone gen x-1. In it I had fed the drum track from Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ into the synth and then messed around with the delay. The section I sampled I had actually already used once before on a track called ‘mää lähestyn taivasta’ (Finnish for ‘I’m approaching heaven’). That track was more in the style of vaportrap but thematically centered around flying as well so it only felt fitting to repurpose it here.
[2. CREATION]
■ The A. O.: How do you usually approach composition? Do you start with a concept, a sound, a state of mind or what else? How do you generally proceed from the initial seed to the complete work?
► karsino kuuni: I come up with a lot of themes and concepts all the time but when it comes to making the music itself I generally have two modes: Either I make something pretty much from start to finish in one sitting or I create lots of small musical vignettes (a beat draft here, a loop or melody there) that I then leave to ferment and try to combine later on. The concepts usually start coming into the music at the later stage. With this song I feel like it was a rare combination of the two.
[3. FEEDBACK]
■ The A. O.: What do you hope listeners feel or experience when engaging with your music?
► karsino kuuni: To be honest, I just hope they feel SOMETHING when they listen. Even if it’s confusion or something more negative like anger. The worst reaction I could possibly get is indifference or boredom. That being said I really love it when people tell me my music takes them to a different place or when it makes them float.
[4. IDENTITY]
■ The A. O.: In a world saturated with digital music content, how do you try to keep your sound distinct and personally meaningful?
► karsino kuuni: That is a difficult question, because I kinda just do stuff. Haven’t really thought about it from that angle that much. I guess what I do is just experiment with a lot of different ideas. Truth is, I sometimes have no idea what I’m doing, so I feel like the most interesting sound experiments have come from me just learning stuff about making music as I go along. I also don’t have that much fancy equipment to make my music with so a lot of the choices I’ve made musically have come from me trying to figure out how to do things without paying a lot of money, such as recording vocals with no audio interface or good microphone and generally just embracing a very lofi DIY sound. One thing that I love to do with the karsino kuuni project is focus on the space or environment that the story of a song takes place in. If I use a lot of my own vocals on a song then I try to make it sound as if my voice is unseparable from that space or environment, often just silently in the background to create a mood. On this EP for instance I recorded spoken word vocals for the song ‘hevoshaka (original_version)’ at the Hevoshaka park in Tampere. That way the vocal track ended up including the park’s soundscape within it.
[5. INFLUENCES]
■ The A. O.: Mention 3 albums that you consider relevant to your musical path and why.
► karsino kuuni: I listen to soooo much different music that it is hard to shoutout just three but I’m going to do my best by focusing on some albums that have influenced the sound of karsino kuuni. The three genres that have inspired this project the most are hip hop, vaporwave and ambient music, so I chose one album from each.
I have a playlist on my youtube channel of music that inspired my first album, in case you want to know more of my influences:
○ Busdriver – Electricity is on our side
This might just be my favourite album of all time. Driver is a unique artist, not only as a rapper but also as a beatsmith: the way he weaves all these textures into his instrumentals has influenced my own music a lot. The opener blends the borders between freestyle, sound collage and field recording so seamlessly, it feels like you’re there with Driver and the street performer he freestyles with (I highly recommend you look into the story behind the making of this track). The song ‘I’m from a different time’ has probably my favorite hip hop instrumental of all time. It sometimes feels like this beat alone has inspired a lot of the music I’ve made over the years. I also would like to shoutout the closing track ‘pull the sky closer’, a bittersweet anthem about addiction. It sounds cliche but this song has been a huge comfort when I struggled with my mental health around the turn of the decade.
○ Nmesh – Dream Sequins®
I feel like this is the magnum opus of vaporwave as a genre. The way samples are used here has inspired my music a lot over the years, especially on my first album. I love how Nmesh uses all these different samples as almost an alternative to traditional songwriting. The structure and flow of this album is like one giant collage of different memories. The end result is a psychedelic and mystical journey through nostalgia. I highly recommend the visual album made for this as well. To me it’s like ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ but for the current century. It’s like a temple to worship your own past at by remembering the media you soaked in throughout your formative years.
I actually use samples from the song ‘Climbing the corporate ladder’ on some of my songs. I downloaded the stems a few years back when Nmesh did a remix competition for the song. I never ended up making a good enough remix but the stems have come in handy here and there, especially when I make beats.
○ Locust Toybox – Drownscapes
David Firth has been one of my biggest artistic inspirations. I was a big fan of his animations before I came across his Locust Toybox project. In retrospect this album may have been my gateway to ambient music in general. This album has such a wide variety of moods: cozy yet otherworldly, dark and gloomy but also very melancholic. I feel the need to shout this album out especially because I namedropped the closing track ‘So’ on my EP. Similar to ‘pull the sky closer’ it has comforted me during some of my worst moments. It’s a song that I feel like I could peacefully die to. Play it at my funeral, please.
[6. REGARDS]
■ The A. O.: Leave us with a quote you love.
► karsino kuuni: Not really a quote but the phrase ‘the past inside the present’ from Boards of Canada’s song ‘music is math’ resonates a lot with me and my music. Nostalgia can be a beautiful bittersweet feeling but I have a tendency to overindulge in it sometimes. That is why I’m trying more and more to break out of it these days.