Andromatic sexophone

Thursday I caught the second half of the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, the part happening at Kunst-Werke in Mitte. If the Martin Gropius Bau part of the show focused on environmental issues, this part gave us stuff about clothes, fashion, girl rock, work, politics, scent, sound. The best thing in it, for me, was Mika Taanila's film about Erkki Kurenniemi, The Future is Not What It Used To Be (Finland 2002). A pioneer of electronic art in Finland, Kurenniemi (born 1941) 'composed computer-based music and designed his own instruments as early as the 1960s. His career embraces music, film, computers, robotics – in other words, both art and science – with natural ease.'

What was so wonderful about Taanila's film was that it took this marginal, unknown (to me, at least) figure and showed him going through all the familiar countercultural events of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, at least as they appeared to the hippy geeks of the electronic music labs. You could call the resulting film, fabulously dramatised with period clips and soundtracked with Kurenniemi's interesting music, the Spinal Tap of musique concrete and related media art. We see Kurenniemi as a short-haired schoolboy in the 50s, then getting 'switched on' as he goes from a synth-building geek to a McLuhanite hippy and university drop-out, sex conductor, robotics entrepreneur, video game designer, cable administrator for Nokia, and finally obsessive crank, documenting his every move so that his personality and history can be poured into a computer when he's dead.



If the current Kurenniemi is a somewhat scary and pathetic figure, his hippy self of forty years ago is an inspiration. The sheer number of ideas he generated in the 60s and 70s is incredible. He made experimental films and Stockhausenesque electronic music, he invented a collective instrument, he equipped Finnish prog bands with synths, he hooked up a video camera to a computer system so that music could be generated by the movements of dancers or the expressions of a human face, he made a music system (the 'sexophone', natch) in which group sex is turned into music through electrodes placed on the particpants' bodies, he started a company that made industrial robots, he developed music systems that could include light, smell and vibration into the composition process... and each episode on this odyssey is illustrated with amazing TV footage which captures the wild sense of possibility that seemed to reign at the time.



The Venice Biennale catalogue takes up the story: 'The first "automated instrument" Kurenniemi built was the Andromatic, a synthesizer commissioned in 1968 by the Swedish composers Leo Nilsson and Ralph Lundsten for their newly established Andromeda studio. That same year, an old friend, M.A. Numminen, invited Kurenniemi to design a new kind of electronic "collective instrument". The result was called Sahkokvartetti (Electric quartet), a mind-boggling combination of four instruments in one: a drum machine, violin machine, voice machine and melody machine. After that, Kurenniemi developed a range of digital instruments. The first was called dimi-a (Digital Music Instrument, Associative Memory), which retrieved stored data based on the contents of memory cells rather than their addresses, thus making the use of the limited memory space more efficient. The dimi-o (Digital Music Instrument, Optical Input, 1971) transformed video images into real-time music. This worked well, for example, in accompanying dance performances. The musician could also pan the entire audience with the camera, thus involving them in the creation of the events heard in the concert. dimi-s (a.k.a. "The sexophone") was conceived by Lundsten and technically constructed by Kurenniemi in 1972. With dimi-s the players held contacts with which the instrument sensed when they touched each other and generated sound sequences dependent on the intimacy of the person-person contact. The contacts controlled the synthesizer. Kurenniemi also designed an instrument called the Electroencephalophone (dimi-e), in which the electronic sound was monitored by electrodes behind the player's ears, recording changes in the user's brain activity.'

Later in the Berlin Biennial (27th March, in fact) Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio will play a special concert using Kurenniemi’s original, restored 1960s instruments -- the Andromatic, the DIMI-A, and the Electric Quartet. We're promised 'surprise guests' as the third and fourth players of this collective instrument. Vainio comments: ‘Erkki Kurenniemi is a genuine pioneer. He could have been one of the best-known makers of electronic music in the 1960s if his stuff had got more publicity.’



Here's a recent interview with Kurenniemi.

Here's Phinnweb's guide to his work. And here's their excellent survey Electronic Music in Finland -- the early years.