Quiet on Kökar by Trajectories

The album Quiet on Kökar was conceived of during a recent artist residency undertaken on the small island of Kökar in the Åland Archipelago in Finland, experimenting with a variety of recording set-ups and collaborative compositional techniques, following ideas of the non-anthropocentric positioning of the artist, both at the time of recording, composing and performing. 

The island of Kökar is a quiet and serene environment, located in the middle of the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, amongst a grand archipelago called Åland that consists of thousands of tiny and large islands. This particular island is home to approximately 225 people who live in a place accessible exclusively by boat and helicopter. Kökar has a deep spiritual history; having been a point on the Nordic Pilgrimage route “St. Olav Waterway” since at least the 14th century. Small enough to walk across in a few hours, the island is fiercely exposed to the weather of the sea. At one point during the stay there was a record breaking wind storm that snapped trees and shook the house. It was a very humbling experience and served as a sobering reminder of the unstoppable forces of nature. Through visits to the Kökar museum and communication with residents of the island there were new lessons learned about the vulnerability of the island’s ecosystem as well as the dutiful efforts the community is taking to maintain conscious sustainability in daily life. Throughout its settled history the island has seen many cycles of abundance and scarcity connected to the amount of energy it takes to sustain human populations. The recognition of this vulnerability was ever present while engaging in creative processes during the 3 weeks of the residency.

Throughout the stay there were efforts made to document expeditions utilizing field recorders, hydrophones and various cameras to become immersed in the sights and sounds of Kökar. The aim was to nurture gradually emerging artistic themes surrounding the island's ecological and historical character and, as a result, engage in new work with personal meaning amplified by the island’s deeper context. Kökar revealed many things, sharing reminders of the fragility of ecosystems and the irrevocably intertwined connections between human and non-human agents in even the most remote environments, awareness of which will be carried forward into future Trajectories work.