This section is to be updated and revised, but covers my activities up to 2003. Check out the archives.
In November 1990 I won Amiga 500 computer from the competition of certain Finnish computer magazine. I was randomly picked from a group of 1600 participants. I was then 14 years old. After a few months I started to make music with my new toy. I had done some musical programming before with my old commodore 64, mainly just entertaining myself with random note generators, now the readily available programs were hugely advanced sample based stereo 4-trackers. I had fun in learning to use them. For a long while I didn't realise there exists something like semitones. Here's the second tune I've ever made, this is from 1992 and it's name is Kill The Mouseman ! [1 MB]. I had no musical background except banging some cardboard boxes when I was a child. I used to play with cassettes too, turned the tapes upside down and listened whole sides backwards fascinated by it all.
So, gradually I learned the tricks of the trackers, little findings made me greatly happy. After a couple of years I got myself a simple mono sound digitizer that some acquaintance had made to me and I began sampling everything. Again a new world opened, I watched simple realtime oscilloscope screens for hours and zoomed sampled waveforms in and out wondering it all. Some of the sampling programs were able to produce realtime effects to the input sound. One day in the beginning of 1994 I plugged the output of the Amiga to the input of the sound digitizer. What followed was something very interesting.. The reverb effect in the loop made the resulting feedback to generate itself gradually, not in the usual ear aching fashion, because of the little delay between the input and the output. It turned out to be a strange progressive process. I could control it all with the input volume of the sound digitizer. With a properly balanced setting the sound would continue to twist and develop for hours never repeating itself. I continued experimenting by attaching my sister's toy keyboard to the loop to create seeds for the sound to process. I made a 30 minute recording of the sound and it was later partially played on a Finnish radioshow specialized in ambient and experimental music. I don't have the original recording anymore, but one of my friends copied the whole piece to a couple of a few minute computer cassettes he happened to have. Here is an excerpt of the piece from one of the cassettes that is still left. The title is Ylioppilaskirjoitukset [3.9 MB] which means matriculation examination.
In the spring 1995 I acquired a keyboard and started playing with MIDI. This is the earliest MIDI track of mine, that has survived from those days, probably the second I've done. Track's title is Medieval Experience [9.7 MB]. Later in that year I acquired a mixer and a drum machine. Now that I had a mixer I was also able to develop the feedback thing further. I had also quite fun distorting everything unproportionally. I used to listen my then favorite Jean-Michel Jarre CDs through a set of distorting feedback loops. Because of the multitude of the instruments I now had I moved to use miditrackers capable of running dozens of channels simultaneously. I had to change my Amiga to a newer and faster version so the software wouldn't lock up. Here's a little rave tune from that time, 0.99c [3.7 MB]. Can't resist putting up another one too.. This is sort of a continuation to the precedent, at least what comes to the title, which is Hyperspace [6.5 MB]. Later in 1995 I had my first live performance with a friend of mine. We played improvised and unrehearsed chill out at rave party for 6 hours, we couldn't much play but had a nice time. Everybody praised us though. I can't still remember anything about the music of that show.
During the spring and the summer in 1996 I bought a couple of real synthesizers and a lo-fi sampler keyboard. Sively [2.3 MB], which means about the spreading on (with a brush/hand..), is a track where I used only preset sounds of one of the new synths and the drum machine. It often was that everytime I felt I had a nice amount of money to support my life I would pretty soon stumble across on an interesting musical device I had to have. This amused me a lot, even if it meant that I had to eat just porridge and pasta for months. Actually, now that I think of it, this aspect of my life hasn't changed since. Here's another track from the period with more tweaking and devices. The title is Teflon [6.8 MB], and it's the first track ever with my now multiple instruments where I didn't use a computer at all. I made a drum pattern quickly and prepared some sounds, and just started to record and tweak not sure what really to do. Luckily I happened to hit the right notes right away. I had a reverb unit already back then too.
In the autumn 1996 I moved away from my hometown to a city nearby to study mechanical and electronic engineering. This is one of the first tracks I did at the new place, it resembles Teflon a lot and it's called Tan [10.1 MB]. I had little by little moved away from the strict sequencing and gradually started to play live over the sequences. Here are a couple of tracks from about the end of 1996 to the spring 1997: Unessa [3.7 MB], meaning in a dream/dreaming, and D9 [4.1 MB]. Since the autumn 1997 I was probably grown to be too lazy to do any sequences at all and begun to build everything solely within the synths and devices (I bought a multieffect unit that summer). D [5.6 MB] was composed partially and recorded during 'The Assembly' computer demoparty. I had then stayed awake for about 48 hours straight. It's one of the last tunes where I used the method of turning the looping tracks on/off while improvising the tweakings.
I begun to create music with my both hands (and legs) instead of moving the mouse with one hand an inch or two while looking at the flickering screen of my computer. Now that I had a direct physical connection with the musical devices I really started to get in to it. I freed myself from the different representations and limitations of time, my music became much more transformative. I realised how there was a feedback now presenting itself trough me and my devices and I was finetuning the controls of it. I filled a cassette after cassette and rarely listened afterwards what I had done. These tracks are most probably from the winter 1997-1998:Taintua [3.5 MB], a poetic expression meaning to lose consciousness, and Aei [5.8 MB].
I played a lot with noises and electric hums and recorded two cassettes of my experiments in the beginning of 1998. One of these was also my first demo, from which these two tracks are taken: modestly named Triumphant victory of the mind over the matter [7.5 MB] and Derivator [4.2 MB]. I used pseudonym univuo, dream flow. I didn't get any feedback, and didn't know anything about anything basically. I didn't follow any scene, I thought my music to be too strange for anybody else than me. I asked myself a couple of times why I always end up doing so strange music, even if I tried to make it normally, and was a little frustrated about the situation. I sensed like I was forced to do something. Strangely I felt better everytime when I pushed the strangeness even further, like telling a joke which expands exponentially to ridicule itself, or like bursting a bubble, only to find myself in another bubble to burst and new limits to explore. Here's something from the other cassette: Nevä [4.3 MB]. The name is the two last syllables of the word ristenevä, meaning contradicting, conflicting, crossing...
The new tracks are direct continuations from the old. The devices are always left to the settings of the previously recorded track. These settings are then manipulated to form up the next track. If I had recorded everything I had done outside of the actual recordings, the result would now be one big transformation of sounds, cyclically organising from the chaos in between. I became aware of how the cyclical process of creation/destruction was present in my mind too via the perceived sounds. This structure seemed to be the real-world analogue of something from the unseen depths of my own consciousness. I was there between the sounds and the perception, the one who makes and the one who hears, observing the process and making it more fluid for the current feeling to come forward more freely. It was like observing a certain valve and refining it's characteristics. The more courageously I let my self go into this stream and identified with it, the more pleasure I got from it and the more it gave me back.
Eventually this mental-physical feedback begun to expand to include the life outside the music. Gradually all the perceptions and sensations became one giant dynamic flow of events. Suddenly the life became very interesting. I couldn't anymore feel negative feelings toward anything, because I realised how the perceived reality was in the end an analogue to the image I had of it in my own mind. With the same attitude of refinement as with the music, to make it to serve the current purpose fluidly, the life could be made to flow too by accepting and mending the slowing down mental elements. I focused wholly to receive everything openly and giving back of the process as much I was able to, as deeds, words and music.
In 1998/1999 I was in Paris for six months as an exhange student. After the long period without my instruments I produced over 200 pieces of music in 1999. Of these tracks an asymmetric piece Muovia [5.6 MB], Plastic, was the first, produced after a couple of days from my return. In the summer I bought myself a minidisc recorder and sold the tape deck. Before this I managed to fill up some cassettes. One session was a continuous stream of tracks in a couple of days. Luon [3 MB], meaning I Create, is from the first evening. The vocal sample was recorded by chance. I just happened to press the Rec button of my sampler at the right time while listening the voice from my television. The sampler had a memory of about 10 seconds, which is just about the length of the sample. For Calibration [1.7 MB], the basis was created using multiple feedback loops within a mixer. I discovered this when I had already packed all of my other instruments and just had a mixer and a couple of cables left to play with. Looped channels were then panned and phased with psychoacoustic intentions. I used to finetune the loop by adjusting the potentiometers of any of the unused channels, they had for some electric reason a fine and minimal effect on the looped channels. I used to experiment quite a lot with similar settings and brain wave frequencies. The following two tracks were among those once presented on my mp3.com pages: Kosketukset [2.6 MB], Touches and Palaudu [2.7 MB], Return. Both were created in a couple of minutes during some intense sessions. Practically the time to create any of the track of this year and before never exceeded one hour. I hadn't set any limit, just grew quickly frustrated because the next track was already coming in. Here's something from the weirder side: Muutu [2.2 MB], which means Change. The last track of the year was Tai [7.3 MB], or Or.
In the spring 2000 I graduated and had to move from the student hostel where I had lived for four years. It had been a beautiful place to live, situated in the outskirts of the city and close by a natural preservation area and a lake. My flat was then grown to look like a compartment from the Mir spacestation, with delicate coloring and lighting from the warp scene of Kubrick's 2001, totally in contrast with the reality outside and no natural light at all.
Moving to the city centre clearly affected my musical output, as there always was something else to do. When I was able to concentrate on the music I studied the triggering properties of my devices and started to create complex systems where every kind of input could be used to trigger sounds, which in turn could be fed back to the system. Here are two documents from those experiments, mellower Arastama [3.2 MB], which means something too complex in Finnish to translate, and psychotic Golden Gloriana [2.3 MB]. The former got it's title from a book by Jack Vance, where it was the name of some futuristic vehicle.
From the autumn 2000 to the winter 2002 I worked at the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, first as a conscientous objector duing his duty and then as a research assistant for a short period of time. I used the option of doing the compulsory military service in a more peaceful manner, and found the observatory from a list of possible places to go. I helped in a couple of projects, of which one was about measuring and recording the sounds of the northern lights. During one intense and beautiful auroral storm I was able to hear something strange myself, and replicated the experience with my instruments. I also created sound material for an auroral show presented in a planetarium nearby, and composed a piece of music to be played between the shows.
I wasn't able to bring all my stuff with me at the same time, and all I had first were my mixer and the effects. Here are two pieces from those experiments: Vana [2 MB], wake (of a ship..) and Soas [1.6 MB], a Lappish expression meaning a place where two rivers meet and become one. While living in my guest room I started to explore the multitude of possible tracks in one of my synths. It eventually ended up with all eight tracks playing different sounds. All my previous tracks had been done with only one sound playing per synth. The idea for Polemia [5 MB], meaning Polemy, or it might also be interpreted to be a request for a person named Mia to stamp her feet or pedal her bike, sparked from the possibility of raising the oscillators' internal pitch all the way up to the fifth octave. This was made possible by uppgrading the software in one of the synths. I could now make noises well beyond the hearing range or use them as high frequency modulators.
With a friend of mine from the observatory we produced a cd combining his skills with the guitar and mine with the technology, we had live appearances as well. Later a copy of the cd was given to Francis Ford Coppola, among other directors, as our personal souvenir from the Sodankylä Film Festival. We set the objective in the beginning of the festival, and devised different schemes how to reach Coppola. Finally I just walked straight to him and gave the cd.
After the work ended I returned back to my former flat and started to focus on improvised live performances. During the spring 2002 I sent a lot of demos around. The only response I got was from Vir Unis. That positive contact has since grown up to be the Ajan Geometria cd. For the local evening of arts in September 2002 I created an interactive sound and light installation, based on contact microphones. I was satisfied to be able to give people a chance to discover the hidden musical properties of the city around them. I connected mics to an old bicycle and other metal trash and sweetened the signal with realtime effects. The most rewarding part was to see the children amazed by the sounds they could make from the objects.
During the year and a half I spent in the city I didn't produce much actual tracks, just listened a lot of music from around the world and read books, generally looking for my place in the world, and specializing somewhat in Indian classical music. Here are a couple of track from those times: Kundalini Explosion [5 MB] and Paha Noita [2.3 MB]. The first one was a track to test the rack mountable monosynth I had bought, most of the sounds playing only one note. The second one means Evil Sorcerer, which comes (literally) from the manual of my dear old sampler. There's a sentence there which blames evil sorcerer for some of the device's feature, which may result in erranous behaviour. The track was built haphazardly with the sampler's very primitive sequencer. I struck the notes without any idea about melody, then slowed the sequencer's playback considerably and struck some new notes with a musical progression in my mind (and red wine).
In the autumn 2003 I moved to another town to study sound processing and music production. I currently live simply in a little and quiet village about 20km from the school, and continue my experiments and explorations.
The tracks presented here are not selected because they would be my 'best' tracks, but because of their documentary value. My best tracks are still somewhere in the future. The tracks here may be freely distributed and shared, just remember the source and please do not rename them or change the tag information. All these tracks are unreleased, and I naturally have the copyrights for them. Thank you for everything, basically. The CD is reasonably priced, go and get it :)