News/posts

Five reasons why I created an Onlyfans account

11 December 2020

If you would like to spend $4.99 per month to see me post biweekly video essays about music and other things on my mind, please go to onlyfans.com/icewhistle and subscribe to my Onlyfans. $1 of that goes to Onlyfans; $1 I will donate to the Democratic Socialists of America; the other $3 will go towards maybe buying myself a tripod or some better gear.

This video trailer will explain...

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I published three books.

26 January 2020

I'm pleased to announce the release of a three volume book series, Seventeen Years of Media Consumption (2002–2018), on Scarlatti Tilt. Details, sample pages, and ordering information can be found on the Scarlatti Tilt website.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

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October activities: Radio of Changes @ Urbanapa x Ateneum, talk in Nashville

27 December 2018

Hi!  I am part of the Radio of Changes project with Emily & Roy Boswell. We are conducting live hexagram readings on the top floor of Ateneum museum in Helsinki all this week, for a radio broadcast that goes throughout the festival. The hexagram readings will be broadcast as well as some radio dramas we have worked on, interviews, documentation of the festival and some...

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Kuusi Palaa: view from within season one

25 April 2018

The Biathlon system that I have been co-developing since 2016 has been in use at Kuusi Palaa, a cooperatively operated project space in Helsinki. Kuusi Palaa opened on 1 March 2018 and will run at least until the end of June. The idea for Kuusi Palaa was to continue using the Biathlon tools that Temporary used (and operating in the same physical space), but to further decentralise the financing...

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World is Sudden: Summer Lab (+ bursaries available!)

19 June 2017

I'm honoured to have been invited to participate in the World is Sudden: Summer Lab project by Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects next month. The project will take place in Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and the North Pennines, and I'll be one of the artists along with Anne-James Chaton, Rory Pilgrim, Giles, Christian Jendreiko, Christo Wallers and the Glasgow Open Dance...

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About Temporary (donate, please!)

25 April 2018

Since September of last year, my day-to-day attention has been focused on Temporary, which we call a 'sandbox for practice-based research into experimental interactive formats’ in Helsinki.

I’m one of the initial organisers of the project, which we started to collect different approaches to culture production, specifically focusing on participatory, trans-disciplinary events....

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Temporary/Biathlon presentation in Riga 27.7.2016

26 July 2016

My main project this year has been working with my colleague Agnieszka Pokrywka on the creation of a new toolkit for enabling participatory, trans-disciplinary culture environments. The toolkit, called Biathlon, will be tested out in a physical project space called Temporary, which we will open in Helsinki in September. Agnieszka and I have been supported throughout the year by the Kone...

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Experimental Event in Pori, Finland

14 October 2013

Hi everyone!  Does anyone want to come to the west coast of Finland and wander around petrol stations for a few hours, picking up various random objects on the way, and then building narratives and histories around them? 

I totally copped out on a title, but Yet -unnamed explorations is Wednesday the 23rd of October, and part of the fascianting Experimental Event ...

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August 2013 at Ptarmigan

31 July 2013

In August we're pleased to host Done Kino, the first Kino Kabaret event in Estonia. At Done Kino, participants will create collaborative film/video projects built from previously shot, unfinished material which they will bring. The workshop is set up as a 99-hour event, in three 33-hour sessions, with a public screening after each session. There's still a bit of space left on the...

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Slothrop's, Tallinn, Estonia

20 January 2012

If you're in Tallinn, please stop by Slothrop's on Müürivahe 19.  You'll find a large selection of secondhand books in English - literature, history, art, politics, essays, criticism -- the works.  Slothrop's is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 18, Eastern European Time.  Soon we'll hopefully have a (carefully-curated) selection of...

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Recent things.

20 January 2012
Dispatches from a website I do a piss-poor job of keeping up-to-date:

  •  I've been based in or around Tallinn for one year now.  Ptarmigan I can say has been going well; it's been an amazing thing and it's more momentum than inertia here.  We've had too much going on to fully talk about here, as we've had something like 80 events since April, but there's lots in the works for 2012,...
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Oakwhistle live show in Tallinn: 17. september 2011

20 January 2012
I'm going to perform solo/live for the first time in ages, as Oakwhistle again.  It's at the Soodevahe festival in Tallinn on the 17th of this month.  Expect something along the vibe of the Boat Trip LP only maybe sloppier - but (un)focused around hesitation, delicacy, and misguided stabs at beauty.

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Miscellaneous expertise @ MoKS AVAMAA 2010

20 January 2012


Next month I will be coordinating a workshop entitled Miscellaneous expertise: performance, unlearning stories and public speech at the MoKS Kunsti ja Sotsiaalpraktika Keskus AVAMAA sympsium in Mooste, Estonia.  This is a collaboration with my good friend Giles Bailey, and the workshop will take place over five days with the dissemination on the sixth.

We proposed Miscellaneous...
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The 15,000 Day Boat Trip: now available!

20 January 2012
I'd like to announce (with great pleasure) that The 15,000 Day Boat Trip is finally available! 8mm038lp

This is an LP that I recorded during my final year in Glasgow, in 2007.  It's one long piece split over two sides , and I have been describing it to people as "instrumental music".  To be a bit more detailed, Boat Trip contains similar concrète assemblages to what we did in Lied Music, but...
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'Last Night on Earth' tape

20 January 2012
Ikuisuus has just released a split casette between Last Night on Earth and New Yaki.

Lastnightnewyaki

I appear on the Last Night on Earth side playing esraj, along with Jani Hirvonen, Mari Imppola and Jari Koho.  This was recorded ages ago after I just moved to Finland and was probably the first time I had played with anyone in months.  I haven't heard the recording in awhile but it is available for...
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Serious Introspection
with John W. Fail was a live show in Helsinki, Finland from 2015-2016. No one is really sure why John hosted a talk show, but a lot of strange things have happened in the universe and this is ultimately pretty insignificant. You know, we did eight shows in the first season and it was pretty time-consuming, but we were excited to come back for eight more in 2016. It's all archived here. Each week, John along with hype man Justin Tyler Tate, interviewed people about their creative process and tried to deliver a direct, communicative experience about art and performance. The show took place at Mad House Helsinki's Ihana Baari, and was free to attend. We tried our best to entertain. We've made videos available from all episodes of the show here for you to watch. The show is indefinitely on hiatus as Justin moved away and other projects took over. We also will occasionally post audio podcasts when we get the time to go more in-depth with people, outside of the public show. The videos aren't always perfect and the audio even less so, but we hope you still enjoy them. But wait, there's more! We will come to your event and offer our services for hosting, hyping and media specialisation (live tweeting) for a variable fee. We are still available, in theory to be booked for parties, wedding, bar mitzvahs and other events. The for-profit arm of Serious Introspection is called SI Services and we're up for anything, really! Now that we all live in different places, it's probably going to be quite an ordeal just to have three white guys host your kid's birthday party. But please believe me when I say that we would really, really love to do this. If you'd like to find out more about Serious Introspection, you can start by watching these episodes and seeing if it's your cup of tea. We have a Facebook page which we use to post info about the upcoming shows and videos as they are released. We have made the show available as a podcast where people get Podcasts, generally iTunes or Stitcher. Try the Overcast app, it's really nice. The hashtag #SeriousIntrospection contains the running stream of live tweets from our media specialist Ernest Truely (and anyone else who might contribute). So yeah, that's it, pretty much. We're trying to keep this page simple, if for no other reason than our cup runneth over with websites already. We will announce future events and SI-related matters here so feel free to check back any time.