| |
After 40 years, it’s about time
a rough guide to the recorded history of the early experimental/underground
music in Finland was sketched. In 1961, the most radical Finnish
music was produced in an experimental studio in rural southwestern
Finland – that is, the bedroom of young student M. A. Numminen
in his childhood home in Somero. That year, together with his
friends (Tommi Parko and Pekka Kujanpää) who were also
fascinated by contemporary electronic music and free jazz, Numminen
recorded the first ever Finnish piece of musique concrète,
Eleitä kolmelle röyhtäilijälle (Gestures
for Three Belchers, featured on the compilation Arktinen
hysteria, Love Records, 2001) which wasn’t released until
1967. Modern art is often accused of being difficult to grasp,
but at least Eleitä, literally belched with the aid
of fizzy mineral water, unfolds with exemplary ease.
In addition to singing Schubert’s
lieds in a decidedly out-of-tune voice resembling that of a sheep,
Numminen shocked the friends of high-brow culture in 1964 by participating
in the Academic Cultural Competition, using an electronic, voice-modifying
singing-machine in his solo vocal performance. Advanced as it
was, unfortunately the bleepy gadget didn’t do much to enhance
Numminen’s voice, even if the singer actually felt there
was some room for improvement. In order to develop his equipment
further, he turned to his friend Erkki Kurenniemi.
Kurenniemi had been an active participant
in the earlier happening-type of concerts that had caused
a great deal of general puzzlement. These had been arranged since
late 1962 by Helsinki-based Suomen Musiikkinuoriso, a group of
critics and composers (Erkki Salmenhaara, Henrik Otto Donner,
Ilpo Saunio, Kaj Chydenius and Kari Rydman among others) who had
a background in serious music and no connection to the Somero
belchers. Improvisation, the use of chance and collage now became
virtues. The happenings witnessed people playing grand
pianos prepared with screws and nails, kicking the bottom of a
piano, sowing peas in the audience, packing an iron and books
in a suitcase or sunning themselves in the street. Musicians might
play different solo concertos simultaneously – or whatever
took their fancy. Noise was accepted as music, and so was silence:
the group’s debut concert in December 1962 included a performance
of John Cage’s famous four and a half minute portrayal of
silence.
Electronic music, inspired by Karlheinz
Stockhausen et al, had been produced in Finland as early as in
1960 (the first compilation of early 60's tapes, called On-Off,
will be released soon by the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art
as part of Petri Kuljuntausta’s book of the same name). However,
as a technical innovator and visionary Kurenniemi was a pioneer.
In 1962 he started to build an experimental studio in a book storage
room of the Department of Musicology at the University of Helsinki,
and in 1964 he built his first synthesizer which took up a couple
of square metres of floor space and had components salvaged from
a local scrapdealer. Instead of the pure sine wave sounds often
favoured in electronic music, Kurenniemi was interested in the
square wave that, in practice, sounded like a distorted guitar.
No wonder his invention was also applied in rock music.
He also helped composer Erkki Salmenhaara
to edit and put together the first record containing Finnish electronic
music, Information Explosion, that was made as a background
loop for the Man in Society Pavilion of the 1967 Montreal Expo.
Four years prior to that, Salmenhaara had already staged the first
ever piece of Finnish live electronics, a concerto for two electric
violins, which was described as “raw-sounding”. In his
writings, he advocated the “impurity” of music, and
was also interested in the underground music of the late 60's.
With Information Explosion Salmenhaara made a conscious
effort to avoid the typical sterility of electronic music by “sampling”
various records representing the “information explosion”
– a popular concept even before satellite television and
the Internet.
Noisy machines
M. A. Numminen pursued his involvement with serious music by commissioning
Kurenniemi to build him the Sähkökvartetti (Electric
Quartet) machine which would enable live performances of electronic
music. The “electric violin” of the contraption consisted
of one potentiometer. The frequency of the “melody machine”
was regulated by covering its photo-resistors with a piece of
rubber. The “electric drums” which could also be played
manually had a sequencer that repeated different rhythm patterns.
In addition to a microphone, the singer was given an aluminium
stick, and by closing its photo-resistors he could switch on various
filters and distortion circuits. The whole repertoire of the group
using this appliance consisted of only one piece, varying in length,
called Kaukana väijyy ystäviä (Far Away Lurk
Friends). At the 1968 International Youth Festival in Bulgaria,
it didn’t take very long for a considerable part of the audience
to walk out of the 4,000 capacity concert hall after being subjected
to the tormenting wail of the gadget!
Kurenniemi used the Andromatic device
he had built for a Swedish studio to record some of his own music
in 1968. He reckoned people found electronic music, accused of
being “lifeless”, strange only because it was a product
of a culture alien to them. Kurenniemi imagined that mechanic,
human-like beings, capable of dancing, could produce something
resembling Antropoidien tanssi (The Dance of the Anthropoids).
This early piece of bleepy dance music only gained wider recognition
in 1970 when an excerpt of it ended up on Wigwam’s Tombstone
Valentine album. That is why Antropoidien tanssi is
the only piece of his ouvre (totalling not more than about
a dozen compositions) that he gets the occasional PRS cheque for.
In 1970, Kurenniemi also completed his
Digital Music Instrument synthesizer. It was a box, approximately
50 cm in length and depth and 20 cm high, that produced sounds
when the connection strips on its cover were touched with metal
pins. Unlike older sequencers, this clumsy piece of equipment
even had memory units. It could store one hundred commands, so
in practice only two or three bars at a time could reside in its
memory. Later models were controlled by, for example, a video
camera (Dimi-O), touch (Dimi-S, also known as Sexophone) or brain
impulses (Dimi-E). The a-side of the record released by the small
label Musica to promote Dimi started with Bach’s two-part
inventions and finished with an improvised “outvention”,
i.e. free electronics, in the midst of which the inventor of the
machine can be heard roaring.
Sounds from sauna
The notorious underground band The Sperm, whose performances repeatedly
violated osbcenity laws, debuted with Eteenpäin! in 1968.
The untitled mini-album contained, in addition to the grunts and
screams of the singer, weird neurotic noises, knocking, chafing
and guitar sounds treated beyond recognition with tape echo, etc.
All this had been created in the studio that the groups’s
chief composer Pekka Airaksinen had built in his small sauna hut.
Airaksinen created long psychedelic delays by playing an electric
guitar through a tape recorder plugged into an amplifier and by
further interconnecting tape recorders . The equipment was left
constantly switched on because someone might accidentally kick
a guitar lying on the floor and make an interesting sound. Mistakes
were allowed, and even hoped for: a couple of years later, the
self-financed Shh! album (re-released on CD in the late
90’s by Airaksinen’s Dharmakustannus imprint) had a
16 minute opening track called Heinäsirkat I (Crickets
I) whose background rumble was actually feedback. The chirping
cricket sounds were discovered when Airaksinen accidentally cross-connected
the microphone and line input cables.
The Terry Riley/Andy Warhol type of repetition
favoured by The Sperm was epitomized on visual artist J. O. Mallander’s
solo single 1962/1968 from 1968. The tracks featured vote-counters
repeating “Kekkonen”, the name of the overwhelming
winner the presidential elections in 62 an 68, over and over again.
Mallander also pioneered scratching on his Decompositions
ep (Love, 1970) on which he deconstructed well-known jazz recordings
by deliberately jumping the needle of the record player and looping
key parts of the songs.
The Sperm withered away in the early
70's, partly due to the court cases brought against the group,
but Airaksinen continued to work on his own projects. The album
One Point Music, released in 1973 on his own O-records,
contained e.g. sounds of raindrops. Both the level of the technology
of the time and the working methods of Airaksinen are characterized
by the fact that the background tape to Pieni sienikonsertto (A
Little Mushroom Concerto), produced at the Department of Musicology,
contains inadvertent backward sections that the composer eventually
found quite agreeable. On the back sleeve of the record, critic
Ilpo Saunio compares Airaksinen to contemporary giants like Stockhausen,
Iannis Xenakis, Gottfried Koenig etc. However, in actual fact
Airaksinen stood closer to popular music, rock and jazz. Even
at its most meditative, his music had the pulse of Afro-American
rhythm music – it might have been faint, but it was there.
This rhythmic undercurrent is conspicuous
on the recordings which were made in 1972–75 and released
in the late 90’s under the name Gandhi-Freud by Dharmakustannus.
The electronic dance music or rock of this duo consisted of synthesizer
pieces, dedicated to different elements and vitamins (A, B, E,
etc), whose titles remain exceptionally concise and to the point.
Their music had a totally different attack, edge and rhythm than
the acoustic and more aleatoric “green” free jazz played
by the contemporaneous Samsa-trio, which Airaksinen was also a
member of. In addition to Gandhi and Freud, the group could easily
have sworn in the name of Howling Wolf, or Velvet Underground.
Punk and bleeps
Even if much of the late 70's punk rhetoric was directed against
the preceding generation, many new wave names had roots in progressive
rock and were interested in musical experimentation. In 1977 Kari
Peitsamo made his breakthrough with simple and funny Jonathan
Richman-type of pop songs. The next year Love Records released
his Puinen levy (Wooden Disc; included on the 1993 re-release
cd Kari Kolmas – Puinen levy). The ep showed that
besides Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Beatles, he was also
influenced by John Cage and Ornette Coleman. The majority of Finnish
rock fans failed to interpret his lazy one-chord guitar, heavily
pounded cluster chords on piano and screeching out-of-tune violin
as an extreme but logical form of punk and regarded the record
as a questionable joke or a plain freak-out; only about 124 copies
of the record were sold. The following double album Kari Peitsamo
& Ankkuli (also re-released on cd by Love in 1997) featured
a track inspired by Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, on
which the artist abused three overdubbed pianos, but in the 80's
Peitsamo returned to the traditional minimalism of three-chord
rock.
Self-financed records were a perfect
vehicle for the most elemental dormant talent. They were a manifestation
of the fact that Finnish punk was not only about a certain type
of music, but also an attitude that permitted one to record practically
anything. Nokia-based group Yhtye’s remarkably compact Apatian
tanssi (Dance of Apathy) (1979) consisted of 55 seconds of
kick drum.
The Tornio group Aavikon Kone ja Moottori’s
Karavaani (Caravan; included on the compilation cd The
Golden Greats of IKBAL, Bad Vugum, 1995) was, in 1979, one of
the first DIY records of the punk era and didn’t fit the
common conceptions of punk at all. The repetitive tinkle of the
small yellow plastic WASP synthesiser that went on throughout
the record was provocative in its monotony, though the absence
of vocals was originally a technical blunder. The cosmic sound
of Karavaani that emphasizes the record’s theme of longing
for faraway places was produced in a sauna by directing sound
through metal pipes. Their second single Rakkaudella sinulle
(To You with Love) presented innovations like a “post-Gregorian”
choir repeating the word “motor”, and a relay beating
against a bird cage which, after echo treatment, sounded like
a motor being turned on. Even though the trio’s leader Läjä
Äijälä is better known for the hardcore punk of
the legendary Terveet Kädet, AKJM were inspired by Dada,
M. A. Numminen’s Sähkökvartetti and the
new British synth scene from Human League to Throbbing Gristle.
Cassette noise
Finland entered the world of international cassette culture in
the early 80's when a few mainly tape- producing avant-garde units
emerged. The catalogue of the Power imprint (no relation to the
Lahti-based record company of the same name), which was founded
in 1982 and operated from a studio built into a swimming pool
in eastern Helsinki, leaned towards synth pop tinged with some
sort of humour.
Finland’s first alternative cassette
imprint Valtavat Ihmesilmälasit Records modernized the 60's
notion of “tape music” with about 20 titles that it
released in 1980–82. They were definitely lo-fi with a lot
of noise and boasted artwork that had been photocopied on a machine
probably made in Uzbekistan. Normally 10 to 20 copies were made
of each tape; occasionally even as many as 40 (excerpts on the
Pilottilasit – Samples from Helsinki Underground 1981–1987
compilation, N&B Research Digest, 2000). Behind the numerous
pseudonyms hid a group called Swissair, six schoolmates who had,
already at 15 or 16, become bored with punk and rock music in
general and focused on PiL, Residents, Cabaret Voltaire and Peitsamo’s
Puinen levy instead. Swissair’s suggestive buzz or
drone was mainly produced with distorted guitars. The group’s
first and only synth was a Soviet-manufactured FAEMI that cost
200 Finnish marks and sounded like a toy instrument. Many tapes
from that era sound as if people have just decided to press the
rec button and see what will happen. On Urban Hell Trio’s
tape two separate sessions were accidentally overdubbed. The Uusittu
Pak project recorded children playing games and toy instruments.
There was also a plan for selling chunks of concrete by mail order.
Harri Tuominen’s first synth experiment
was the Kuvio Ski (Figure Ski) cassette (Valtavat, 1981)
recorded on two tape machines that had noise levels of epic proportions.
The slightly more mature Tuominen had become interested in electronic
music in the early 70's and had also played in a new wave band
called Vessel Umpio who released an EP called Seppo on viilee
(Seppo is Chilly) on the Johanna label in 1981. Kuvio Ski
proves how easy it was even for an amateur to get sounds out of
a synthesizer: in addition to guitar and collage sounds, there
are many lovely and peaceful atmospheric sequences based on overlong
notes. A self-financed cassette Orient Henna (1985) packed
in a shampoo carton features an opening collage called Lippukunta
(The Brigade) that starts with a rhythm machine and noise
from Soviet radiowaves.
However, the early 80's avant-garde wasn’t
only put out by eccentric characters on their crude DIY recordings
but by established records companies, too. One of the signings
of the experimental Q sub-label of the now extinct Discophon was
Argon, another duo whose art was based on scientific experiments
conducted at the Department of Musicology. Argon, who eventually
metamorphosed into the comedy synth pop group Organ, already showed
signs of their wisecrack leanings on their untitled debut album
(1981); one of the tracks included the “Applesoft computer
program” that sounded like uncomprehensible wailing when
played on an ordinary record player.
During those years, many former punks
were looking for a new direction. One of the many extraordinary
acts on Johanna, the label that carried on the rock traditions
of Love Records, were Vaaralliset Lelut, founded by multi-artist
Jyrki Siukonen and critic Jukka Mikkola, both sincere fans of
John Cage and Peitsamo. Their acoustic instruments, uncommon in
the avant-garde of the time, included flute, violin, spinet, saxophone,
melodica, triangel, bells and other percussion, as well as “impulsive
sounds”. Lelut didn’t always come up with clearly defined
songs. They produced sound beds - simple repeated melody lines
or dub-style dance tracks - but did record some strangely attractive
pop songs too. Their chosen genre was carefree dilentantism. In
1981–82 Johanna released no less than three albums by the
group, and in 1984 Power compiled a cassette called Hedelmiä
(Fruit) out of their unreleased material. The track Aarteenetsintää
(Treasure Hunt), is experimental music in the literal meaning
of the word: “produced without a goal or a plan, just to
test the new studio”.
From the 1980's onwards
From the 1980's onwards the output of avant-garde in general increased
manyfold due to the emergence of small labels and techno, etc.
Beside the electric output of acts like Pan Sonic, Deep Turtle,
Ektroverde et al, the 1993 classic Rakkaus rinnassa (Love in
the Chest) by Keuhkot proudly represents the more unusual,
unplugged avant-garde. This one man group became known for its
unique noise that has been described as “meta-musical art
mangled by lung cancer or tuberculosis” and “no-wave
techno cabaret performed by mentally ill Turks”. Past Keuhkot
live gigs have included a miracle cure show, a cabbage soup cook-out
and an idle attempt at growing a plant in a pot – a project
that went on from one gig to another. Re-released on the Keuhkot
CD Mitä otat mukaan sivistyksestä (What Do You Take
Along With You When Leaving Civilization Behind; Bad Vugum,
1996), Rakkaus rinnassa at first sounds like consumption,
but the coughing sound is in fact a sneeze - itching and allergy
form the piece’s frame of reference. In the recording session
the group could only produce one successful sneeze which then
had to be replicated. The track is an elegant continuation of
the Human Voice in Music series of musique concrète
which M. A. Numminen & co started back in 1961 with their
recorded belches.
The article is based on a series broadcast
in 1999 in the Avaruusromua programme of Radiomafia/Finnish Broadcasting
Co. The author has compiled the CD Arktinen hysteria (Love
Records) released this autumn, featuring tracks by M. A. Numminen,
Sähkökvartetti, Erkki Salmenhaara, Erkki Kurenniemi,
J. O. Mallander, The Sperm, Pekka Airaksinen, and many others.
Pekka
Airaksinen and Keuhkot
will perform live at Avanto club in Gloria on 9th November. The
author of the article will play as DJ
maisteri Lindfors at the same event. Erkki Salmenhaara’s
Information Explosion can be heard as part of Ian
Helliwell’s Expo World at Kiasma on 11th November.
|
|
