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Erkki Kurenniemi: “Improvisaatio”
From the album Recordings 1963-1974 (2002)
For various cultural and economic reasons, the standard version of the history of electronic music tends to be dominated by western Europe and the United States. The hot spots are always the same: the Italian Futurists, Varèse, then a thirty-year lacuna; suddenly Schaeffer in Paris and Stockhausen in Cologne, maybe Berio in Milan, Cage in New York, then Moog and Milton Babbitt, the birth of the synthesizer and computer music, MIDI, etc., and onward into the no longer narratable mess of the postmodern present.
One of the more remarkable characters inhabiting the margins of this story is the Finnish composer/inventor/futurist Erkki Kurenniemi, whose pioneering work in the 1960s made crucial contributions to music, technology, and the then-fledgling discipline of electronic art. Kurenniemi has finally gotten some attention in recent years, including the 2002 album Recordings 1963-1973, from which the above track is taken, and the 2003 release of the documentary The Future is Not What It Used to Be, which charts Kurenniemi’s brilliant career and his bizarre ongoing existence.
More on Kurenniemi can be found at the Philadelphia Sound Forum Blog.
Played 65 time(s).
November 02, 2009, 6:56pm
