Erkki Kurenniemi - Äänityksiä/Recordings 1963-1973
(Love)
I'm a staunch proponent of The Puzzle, compelled as I am to appraise music within the appropriate historical context. So it's gratifying, sometimes even thrilling, when missing pieces are discovered and fitted in place. Think "Connections," the ingeniously constructed trivia timeline show broadcast by the Discovery Channel.
Finland's Sähkö label once seemed like an anomaly. While many nations could claim distinguished early experimenters in the field of electronic music, establishing a system of "roots" in referential regard to later activity, the harsh, terse pointillist techno minimalism tendered by this company of young Finns had no obvious nationalistic forebear. Correlations could be drawn between the bleak, frigid "horsemeat rockabilly" of Pan(a)Sonic, Sähkö's most visible envoys, and the pioneering work of Germany's Gottfried Michael Koenig
(or that of his better-known associate, Karlheinz Stockhausen), but the lineage was never direct enough to be fully satisfying. Enter Erkki Kurenniemi, Finland's claim to fame in the theater of early electronic music. Long overdue for the recognition/reissue treatment, this homeland hero represents a winning combination of academic credentials and workshop tinkering that proves Sähkö (Finnish for "electricity") and Panasonic ("ideas for life") did not spring from a cultural void, after all.
Kurenniemi was the University of Helskini's resident inventor of electronic instruments, renowned for his technical skills and visionary outlook. His earliest "automated instruments" were quickly snapped up by noted European composers, who marveled at Kurenniemi's ingenuity and built studios around such devices as the Andromatic, The inventor tried his own hand at music in improvised pieces such as 1963's "On - Off," drawing on "sublime" childhood memories of "the turbine hall of the Imatran Voima power plant, where these enormous generators whirred away in a huge hall with fantastic echoing acoustics," while shaping machine feedback through real-time manipulation of knobs and switches. 1963, people. Thirty-plus before the current spate of no-input mixing board mania. Before packing up the Andromatic and shipping it off to Swedish electro-acoustic legend Ralph Lundsten, Kurenniemi indulged in an improvised impression of alien kinesthetics, the jubilant, oft-anthologized "Antropoidien tanssi," which would became his best-known piece. When he wasn't tinkering in his soundlab, toking up with colleagues and responding to Einsteinian equations with tape-splice collages like "Mix Master Universe 2," Kurenniemi was also pre-imagining virtual reality and AI. How can you not love this guy?
As his instruments became more sophisticated, so did Kurenniemi's compositions. A collection of modular drum and instrumental machines, the Digital Quartet, begat the DICO (digitally controlled oscillator), which in turn begat the DIMI-A (digital musical instrument with associative memory, an early computer-based sampler) and the DIMI-O (a groundbreaking wonder that translated optical (video) input into sound). The latter became a favorite in ballet performances throughout the mid-'70s, finding an unexpected secondary application in psychological research. A DIMI-O composition would not be very effective on disc, though the booklet includes a still shot, so Äänityksiä instead showcases the DICO and the violin and percussive components of the Digital Quartet in a series of short pieces. And this is where Pan Sonic comes in, jet-screaming to mind as the stark, rubbery rhythm of "Sähkösoittimen ääniä #1" issues from Kurenniemi's drum machine. Busted!
To keep up with his embarrassment of ideas, Kurenniemi eventually co-founded Digelius Electronics, responsible for enriching Finnish life with "everything from office equipment to train scales and dairy automation." A Digelius Electronics 1970 demo single for the DIMI-A begins as a square-wave rendition of Bach's "two-part invention in A," much like one might have heard from a Commodore64 or Vic20 in the '80s, then digresses into a show of ever-wilder electronic timbres and dissociated noises that would have delighted Raymond Scott, all derived from the instrument's card memory. Regrettably, Äänityksiä does not feature any pieces composed with the DIMI-S (project name: sexophone. No, really!), whose input came from the physical contact between four musicians. How did Woody Allen forget to work this one into Sleeper?
Kurenniemi's later compositions, represented here by a brief untitled experiment, 1970's extended "Virsi (Hymn)" and the aforementioned pot-fuelled Einsteinian riposte, took the form of playful reel-to-reel collages of voices, music and variably accelerating electronic glissandi and vivid Scott-styled "lightworks." These compositions are a bit more mundane than the sci-fantastic creations of Sweden's Rune Lindblad, Austria's Max Brand and beloved American splice-master Tod Dockstader, and they don't carry the political charge of Dick Raaijmaker's challenging conceptions, but they're a welcome inclusion in this valuable overview of unsung genius, still sounding fresh and immensely appealing.
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