I would never expect myself to be queuing for Post Bar at 8pm – a time that is way too early to entre this iconic Kallio club for a night out in Helsinki.
Previous Avanti! Club concerts have provided a casual atmosphere for enjoying contemporary music at the ensemble’s homebase Kaapelitehdas – you can grab a drink from the bar, sit back and enjoy the performance. The “club” here can refer to an established structure curated by the professionals – how contemporary music should be presented and approached within an institution.
Bringing this established “club” structure into a club for dance is a bold movement of Tara Jovana Valkonen. I mean, getting a stamp on my left hand while seeing several professors from Sibelius Academy were there too would never be a combo I have ever imagined.
The dimmed lights and thick haze on the dance floor changed the sensation of sound and space, which provided a unique experience to start the night with Jovanka Trbojević’s “Le Fantôme du Vent”. Angel Molinos was playing bass clarinet under a blue spotlight, accompanied by sounds of air from the electronics.
The player was almost invisible in the gloomy surroundings covered with haze, as if in a haunted scene from an old horror film. This piece is “an expression of ghosts inside and outside of us”1 as Trbojević stated. The dark and intimate space within the audience has extended the experimentation of different playing techniques to exploring the soundscape of the club with no dancing involved yet.
The beginning of Pierre Jodlowski’s “Limite Circulaire” immediately reminded me of Körpermusik (body music), a type of danceable electronic music combining synth-punk and industrial music. It was the moment when the crowd started with some minor body movements on the dance floor. Maybe for a second or two, I quickly associated those minimalistic beats to Kraftwerk and Front 242.
Janette Levan definitely nailed the piece. At first, I was wondering whether there was some live looping that recorded a few bars and piled them up successively. Then I realised those were sampled flute sounds from the tape. Thus, the player had to perform the score precisely in order to make this sound montage work.
Inspired by Dutch painter M. C. Escher’s works Circle Limit I-III, Jodlowski has transposed the geometric realisation of shared surface from the painting to the perception of time through listening experience. The pileups create a non-liner realisation of time, where some elements occurred repeatedly in different sections. As he says:
The piece structures itself in many zones that alternatively exploit the perceptive effects produced by the accumulation: harmonic effects, spatial effects, rhythmic effects…2
The night peaked when Jodlowski and Molinos started improvising with live electronics and bass clarinet, joined later with a surprise by Heli Hartikainen on saxphone. The dance floor started to warm up while the concert was approaching to its end and Post Bar was about to start with its happy hour for clubbing.
“Pre-club at Post Bar” can perfectly conclude my feelings of the concert – it brings me to somewhere in transition, and has set an expectation to keep going until hitting the dance floor.
It starts to deconstruct the established framework of a contemporary concert – a venue that is not a concert hall, the floor that is planned for dancing, the lights that are not designed for lighting up a stage, young audience that normally won’t go to a concert. Performers and audience have been physically squeezed into an intimate space, where the boundary in between is blurred.
But the established structure is still there, where an invisible line has divided the “stage” and “spectatorship” – even though the concert happened in a real night club, there was an unbreakable glass wall that restrained clubbing behaviours.
The fun fact is, the “dress code” within the structure has made both the performers and most of the audience members wear black, or something minimalistic and chic that you would see in an underground club in Berlin.
Why don’t we dance?
- https://core.musicfinland.fi/works/le-fantome-du-vent-for-bass-clarinet-and-live-electronics-fdef2d16-d7de-496b-8fcf-c430e443fe32 ↩︎
- https://www.pierrejodlowski.com/index.php?post/Limite-Circulaire2 ↩︎
Live at the Bar: Avanti! & Jodlowski
12.12.2025 | Post Bar, Helsinki
Programme
Jovanka Trbojević: Le Fantôme du Vent (1999)
Pierre Jodlowski: Limite Circulaire (2008)
Live improvisation
Performers
Pierre Jodlowski, electronics
Janette Levan, flute
Angel Molinos, bass clarinet
Heli Hartikainen, saxphone
Anders Pohjola, sound engineering
Leave a Reply