Anna-Liisa Eller (kannel)
Taavi Kerikmäe (electronics)
Recorded at Arvo Pärt Center, Eesti Muusika Päevad 2020

"Entropy describes all the different possible random permutations of a given system. It is often said that entropy measures “disorder”.  Processes where entropy grows cause irreversible changes in the system that diminish the system’s ability to work, because part of its energy has irreversibly turned into heat." (Wiki.ee)

study in entropy? for kannel and electronics (2020) [Excerpt]

Performers: Ensemble for New Music Tallinn, cond. Arash Yazdani
Recorded at Musicolomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic, 11.10.2021

"...an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries..." 
J. L. Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"

The Garden Of Forking Paths (2021) for sextet

Duo Telluur: Heli Ernits (cor anglais), Kirill Ogorodnikov (guitar)
Recorded in Galerii Noorus, Tartu, Estonia in September 2019

How would birdsong sound to us if we were the size of songbirds? And how would the song of a tree unfold in our ears if we lived slow enough to perceive it?

Bird Music For Trees - Duo Telluur version

James Aylward (bassoon)
Recorded at studio tonus arcus by Dietrich Petzold

"Shaping response-abilities, things and living beings can be inside and outside human and nonhuman bodies, at different scales of time and space. All together the players evoke, trigger, and call forth what—and who—exists."
- Donna Haraway “Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene”

This is an environment for unexpected magic to happen. A becoming-with with the body, the instrument, the electronics, and all the living beings present.

wolves and winds for bassoon and electronics (2021)

Performed by Ensemble Synaesthesis, recorded at International Contemporary Music Festival AFEKT, 31.10.2022
https://www.synaesthesis.lt/

"[…] the world for an immersed being — the world in immersion — does not, properly speaking, contain real objects. Everything in it is fluid, everything in it is in motion, with, against, or in the subject. It is defined as an element or flux that approaches, distances itself from, or accompanies the living being, which is itself flux or part of a flux. It is, properly speaking, a universe without things, an enormous field of events of varying intensity. 
[…]
Permeability is the keyword: in this world, everything is in everything. The water of which the sea is made is not only in front of the fish subject but in it, passing through him, coming out of him. 
[…]
Tiktaalik roseae is just one of the forms we have developed in order to transform the universe into a sea in which we immerse ourselves."

Excerpts from Emanuele Coccia's "The Life of Plants" (La vie des plantes)pp. 32 - 34

Tiktaalik roseae (2022) for sextet and electronics

James Aylward (baroque bassoon)
recorded by Justus Beyer at Ölbergkirche, Berlin, Germany
mixed and mastered by Dietrich Petzold

“What is called “life” is a hesitancy between two different kinds of death: blind machination and total nonexistence. Life as such cannot be opposed to disability. A limb is always a prosthetic limb, an eye is always an artificial one. The engine of evolution is mutation for no reason, such that it is impossible to tell when a new lifeform shows up between a variation and a monstrosity.” 
Timothy Morton “Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People”, pp. 43

scales and spectra (2023) for baroque bassoon and electronics

Negating Blank II - A Response in Sound is an interdisciplinary collaboration consisting of an acousmatic sound installation (dur. 90 min) and a series of durational sound performances (dur. 3 - 5 hours) created in response to the solo exhibition "Negating Blank II: Performacy" by painter/performance artist Dolanbay. 

Sound is immanence in the paintings in silence… 

A subtle sound vibrates the space, emerging from and fading back into silence, at times accumulating into a gentle layered crescendo, then falling back into near inaudibility…. A sounding, resonating, vibrating silence… Like particles of dust quivering and dancing in the light of a sunbeam…

The sound works accompanying Negating Blank II: Performacy are sensitive to the shared performative underpinnings of painting and sound art doing. Imbued with the musicians’ experience of the artworks, they expand the compressed temporal and spatial layers of the paintings into time-based media, revealing the sounds latent in these and responding to the exhibition context as a whole. The works are realised in collaboration with live musicians as well as by means of recorded media.

Negating Blank II - A Response in Sound: Installation Part 9

Commissioned and premiered by Ensemble for New Music Tallinn.
Premiere 21.11.2024 at Festival Sound Plasma, Genezarethkirche, Berlin.

“This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

the dance above the abyss (2024) for sextet and electronics

Ilze Ikse (flute), Linda Jankowska (violin), Gwenaelle Rouger (piano) 
Commissioned and first performed by mmm… in Tokyo, Japan.
Recorded at City University London.

For the past few years already my work has been concerned with instrumental choreography. Contrary to some of my other pieces that explore relatively large-scale gestures, study in silence focuses on micro-choreography and explores a very constrained set of material. It is a piece that requires extremely concentrated listening from both the audience and the players and is best experienced in an intimate performance environment.

“If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.”
Pablo Neruda

study in silence (2013) for flute, violin, piano

Performed by Zubin Kanga

studies in resonance II for solo piano is the continuation of my explorations into the resonating possibilities of the instrument which I started in the piano duo studies in resonance, written in 2011. Like the duo, studies in resonance II is largely concerned with the physicality of piano playing, instructing the performer to use various unconventional hand and arm parts, thus choreographing the movements of the player through the medium of notation. In performance, therefore, the visual aspect of the piece is almost as important as the aural.
studies in resonance II was written for the Australian pianist Zubin Kanga, who premiered it in March 2013 in London.

studies in resonance II (2013) for piano

Eight Miniature Atmospheres (2019) for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello
Performed by Ensemble Fractales
https://www.ensemblefractales.com/

Eight Miniature Atmospheres (2019) for quintet EXCERPT

composer-improviser of Estonian origin currently based in Berlin; also appears as Zebra @ kakaduu.art 
https://tinyurl.com/masingworks

Elo Masing

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