The present is a field torn apart by conflicting forces. The currents of war, technology, colonial violence, and capitalism from deep in history intersect within the matrix of modernity. The present moment is just one intersection point where these currents meet. Amidst their pull, one must actively seek places from which the whole formed by these connections can be glimpsed, even if only momentarily. Only by stepping into the matrix can one comprehend the operational logic that impregnate our lives.

Matrix of Modernity (2024) is an installative sound work composed for four performers and a spatial sound system that depicts human agency in the era of algorithmic control.

The sonic-spatial core of this over hour-long work is constructed from a matrix formed by the performers, speakers and the audience. The piece can be experienced by moving within the grid of speakers spread throughout the performance space, or by positioning oneself at the intersections of the sound sources. In addition to the spatially shifting listening experience, the rhythmic texture of the piece is in constant motion. The steady pulse rooted in the matrix subtly doubles through the 'phasing' technique popularized by Steve Reich, allowing two nearly identical pulses to progressively develop into a recursively unfolding rhythmic network that branches into infinity. 

The phase-shifted rhythms played by the performers on electronic drums merge with sound fields composed of syllables, forming text fragments that momentarily appear and disappear. Modernity emerges, in these colliding fragments, as a contradictory field of historical developments, as a landscape that is ever-unfolding yet simultaneously receding around us.

Drawing on ideas from the xenofeminist manifesto by Laboria Cuboniks, the work celebrates impurity and alienation as sources of new ethics. Matrix of Modernity invites the listener into an architectural sound field where random connections between meaning and noise produce a sensory experience of drifting into the eye of the web of hypermodernity. At the center of the matrix, it is possible to observe how language deconstructs and constructs meanings in ways that are simultaneously chaotic and inexorably logical. The matrix becomes a portrait of the present, which we construct with our actions and which, in turn, shapes us in its own image.

The work is a continuation of Walter Sallinen and Klaus Maunuksela's large-scale sound works, which include eg. UXO premiered at the 2019 Helsinki Festival, and the binaural audiobook of Klaus Maunuksela's essay novel Prosessi (Kosmos, 2024).

The live version of the work was premiered in 2024 by the Copenhagen-based ensemble NEKO3 (Kalle Hakosalo, Fei Nie, Lorenzo Colombo) together with Marta Soggetti as part of the Time of Music Festival in Viitasaari: https://musiikinaika.org/en/matrix-of-modernity-2/

The electronic version of the work was premiered in 2025 at Monom in Funkhaus Berlin as part of CTM Festival: https://www.monomsound.com/events/2025/2/1/monom-x-ctm-present-monom-archive & https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2025/programme/features/monom-x-ctm/monom-archive-2-session-1