SOITTO by Heli Hartikainen & Andrew Melchior

SOITTO is a dialogue – across geographies, forms of expression and listening spaces. It is an encounter: Heli Hartikainen performing at the Silent Festival in Lapland, and Andrew Melchior composing and sending sonic signals south, towards Helsinki. A collaboration without physical presence, but full of echoes. The work is built from fragments – keyboard sketches, poetic verses, saxophone breaths – and explores what creating together can mean in the midst of distance. Spatial Audio is not just technology here, but spatial dramaturgy, a tool for thinking through sound. SOITTO asks: can music remember for us? Can it map absence? Can improvisation stretch across the earth like a thread of thought?

About Heli Hartikainen

Heli Hartikainen is an award-winning saxophonist, composer, and sound artist pushing the limits of expression through abstraction, texture, and improvisation. One of Finland’s boldest experimental jazz voices, they intertwine concept-driven soundscapes with fierce instrumental dedication. Their debut, CHRONOVARIATIONS—a 3D audio longform piece—won the Kritiikin Kannukset 2025 and was Emma-nominated for Best Jazz Album. With a Master’s from the Sibelius Academy, Hartikainen’s studies spanned classical clarinet, jazz, Finnish folk, electroacoustics, and spatial audio.

About Andrew Melchior

Andrew Melchior is a sound artist and creative technologist working at the edge of music, narrative, and machine intelligence. He creates immersive, spatial works that fuse human emotion with technical precision part ritual, part algorithm, part signal in the noise.

Founder of Sonic Amber and longtime collaborator with Björk and Massive Attack, Melchior builds poetic infrastructures: from AI-guided memory maps to cathedral-scale spatial audio. His recent work explores sovereign AI, temporal acoustics, and posthuman storytelling.