He started as a jazz and rock musician and later moved to contemporary music, such as free jazz. But he wasn’t great, so he moved to electroacoustic music and field recordings. But he was dissatisfied. “As much as I love music and the sonic experience you can’t get from gigs, I felt it wasnt enough, so i needed to explore this feeling more”. 

“The stuff that matters is the stuff that bothers you.”

The sound of empty space (2015)

Basanta shows a picture of a microphone pointing to a speaker. “There is something wrong in the picture”. He mentioned that there was a sense of circularity and tools and technology (as a spectrum) that could be argued. Over that image, he built an installation about it. “Sound installations is an encounter with sound and the artist, but it doesn’t mean it has sound on it”. 

Another work was a microphone rotating over speakers, creating an exciting resonance. “I had this idea of a music box ballerina”. As he mentions, the microphone feedbacks a melody that sounds quite blissful – melodies are taken from Tchaikovsky music. 

He states that building a physical composition was rather daunting, as he came from a context that didn’t allow him to do so. This exhibit was minimal, but it allowed him to move on and create more visual art – not sound art. This exhibition, which revolves around feedback, came out as an album (sold out), but it is still available on Bandcamp.

In this project, he also performed – Basanta used feedback amplification techniques that allowed him to play with raw textures of sound. The outcome is impressive – an atmospherical ever, changing piece that resonates with feelings of melancholy.

“Composing is very hard.”

Around the first quarantine, he composed for an orchestra. The notes in the piece are a transcript of one of his favourite songs.

“Listening through a small plastic box.”

A piece that revolves around the soundscape of an art gallery. It plays back the sound of a room and invites the listener to hear the amplified signals coming from outside the box. 

Using a procedural yet nonsensical amplification chain, a live stream of the gallery soundscape is sent into a clear acrylic box containing electronic amplification components and a single speaker cone. As the sound of the surrounding room is amplified within the acrylic box, it reflects in all directions off of the box’s surfaces, accentuating and dampening various frequencies due to the natural resonance of the container. The resonant re-amplification is captured through a small suspended microphone and sent to a set of headphones which are available to gallery visitors.
Through this roundabout process, the gallery’s sonic environment is spatially displaced into the acrylic box, only to re-immerse the listener in it: an act of triple super-imposition of simultaneous adjacent spaces (the room, the box, the listener). By presenting a re-configured acoustic situation – equal parts austere, self-reflexive, and absurd – the listener’s experience of sound is revealed as a complex collaboration of natural, physical, electronic, and perceptual agencies.

Sectioning

It is a series of spatial interventions that try to separate realms of sound—for instance, creating a self-contained acoustic ecosystem. It has four interventions: the outside environment compared to the indoor one. A box that contains a fan and papers. Old fluorescent bulbs are locked inside a box with a microphone. 

Positive Vibes

Revolves around an Adolf Hitler quote. “We could never conquer Germany without the loudspeaker”. Basanta reused this idea and used balloons with helium and a loudspeaker saying “I love you all” in English and Finnish. They threw this device into the city.

Curtain (White)

Earbuds sound like nature. Aleatoric piece made with on-ear headphones (Apple), that sounds rather organic and resembles the sound of bugs or leaves rustling.

A large inscription/ A great Noise (2019)

An ode to Sisyphus’s myth. A circular figure made of rocks, with a microphone rotating around it. It’s slow and never-ending. The microphone amplifies the sound of the mic pushing the stones. It’s also a concept art inspired by eastern life perspectives – life is cyclical.

On the other hand, Great Noise is a piece that resembles a guillotine – a microphone buried in a 45kg block of concrete is pushed and thrown against another block of concrete. There’s a reverb on it. It amplifies these dramatic sounds. The footage he provided shows other blocks of concrete with destroyed mics. “The gallery floor would literally shake”.