SELENE’S VIEW

Selene, the goddess of the moon looks at the earth from the outside. Concerned but distanced. Objectively and with an obvious critical spirit. 
The group approaches jazz with the same offbeat spirit. They want to keep what’s essential, a language open to all influences and above all, a space for listening, interaction, dialogue, freedom and self-expression.
What else? Well, again in the wake of this lunar gaze, the compositions are imbued with lucid thinking about our times, our societies, and the new paradigms we face. Ecological crisis, crisis of work, crisis of meaning. Economic crisis, demographic crisis, migration crisis, social crisis, political crisis.
Stop it, oh oh oh... Do we see all this from the moon? Yes, but with a very special cocktail of lucidity – the kind that means we’re not lying to ourselves. With humor – otherwise we wouldn’t be able to stay positive. With commitment – otherwise we’d be making meaningless songs about nothing. 
And with hope – otherwise we wouldn’t be burdening you with all this.


Fragmentos del Silencio is constructed from newly composed melodic fragments Kari Ikonen wrote for his arrangement of an old Argentinian tango «Silencio». The text of this Carlos Gardel classic tells about the painful nocturnal silence of lonely mothers who have lost all their sons in war. Unfortunately this topic is now as actual as ever.
Data Lake refers to Lamartine’s famous poem. Artificial intelligence, coupled with the hyperactivity of our social networks and connected devices, is generating an enormous amount of digital information about each and every one of us. There’s no escaping the progress of our technologies. The key question is: what do we do with all this data, and who does it  belong to? Will it generate more well-being and more freedom? Or will it be used to dominate us economically and politically? Questions about the balance to be struck between nature and technology, between progress and balance, between freedoms and constraints, are the order of the day. The word Data Lake, inspired by a natural element to describe a technological concept, poetically symbolizes this tension.
The Polish city of Bialystok recently got a massive EU-funding for building bike lanes to its streets. They did, with a plan to immediately return them to car lanes as soon as the support has been received. Just one example how the eco-funds are being misused everywhere. 
Doubt Factory. In the space of just a few years, social networks have revolutionized the way people communicate around the world. They have also served as a revolutionary tool against certain powers, or conversely as a tool for conditioning the masses by economic and political powers. But this particular medium has ended up leaving as much room for information as for misinformation or fake news. In order to destabilize states and influence elections around the world, there are now veritable factories for generating doubt, a real virus for our democracies. The development of AI, without a framework to limit its abuse, will further accentuate this phenomenon.
The word Conflictuous doesn’t officially exist, so it’s a bit conflictuous to use it. But as the word itself has issues, it describes quite well the complexity of all the huge problems humans have on Earth.
Transience, from latin transientem. Nothing in our lives is permanent. The only permanence that exists is that everything is always changing. So everything that seems fixed is only ever temporary. 
The human mind, in search of certainty, often finds it very difficult to accept this. But it is in the awareness of the transience of the present that we can feel most alive. The composition is inspired by a rhythm called Georgina, which is very popular in Iraq and Syria.
Neither does the word Kompelo exist, but in Finnish it sounds like it could be a clumsy fairy-tale character, who struggles passing all the awkward situations in its daily life – just like the mankind does. The theme of Kompelo is written with a semi-dodecaphonic system, where each chord includes one note from the previous one, creating a bit more tonal feel.
Humans are Overexploited. Nature and our planet also. Even animals and machines are getting overexploited. No one escapes this reality at our present times. In the classical indian music, the melakarta offers a reservoir of 72 ragas – scales – of 7 notes. Of all these scales, the one most altered upwards is 1 #2 3 #4 5 #6 7. I thought it might be symbolically interesting to choose this one to represent the phenomenon of overexploitation.
The last track, E-peli is the relief from all these hard topics. E refers to musical Events that are being played on specific hand cues in this peli, Finnish word for game. Also, Epeli means a rogue or a rascal, usually in an affectionate way.

Kari Ikonen, Manuel Hermia