Dead | Finnish music pioneer Esa Kotilainen has died

Musician Esa Kotilainen is dead. He died on Monday, November 6 of a rapidly progressing illness. He was the first to tell about the death Kouvola Sanomat.

Kotilainen was 77 years old, born on April 4 in 1946.

Kotilainen is remembered as a keyboard player, composer and sound artist, who is considered Finland’s first professional “machine musician”.

During his career, he played in dozens of bands and on hundreds of records, from rock to pop and folk music to jazz.

Esa Kotilainen was one of the pioneers of domestic music, who introduced machines to music among the first. Already at the beginning of the 1970s, in 1973, he brought to Finland the Minimoog, an early analog synthesizer that cost the price of a car.

Kotilainen ended up playing dance hits on the Minimoog for Finnhansa, a car ferry that runs between Germany and Finland.

“I noticed right away that the Minimoog is a real instrument, and not some simple electric guitar or just an effects device – even though it was just that at first,” Kotilainen said In HS’s 70th anniversary interview 2016.

In 1977, Kotilainen made Finland’s first synthesizer record with his instrument. Worked by him alone An imaginary child published by Love Records.

At the time, the album did not attract much attention, but later it became a legendary and important part of Finnish music history.

So also went to Minimoog. It fueled a new kind of electronic popular music, and little by little the sounds of the Minimoog and increasingly sophisticated electronic instruments began to be heard on Finnish records, even in iskelmä music.

Kotilainen had a monopoly on the expensive and rare Minimoog for a while. “It helped me get a lot of studio work and I also made music for many commercials, imitating, among other things, the chirping sounds of a bird,” he told HS.

Kotilainen’s Minimoog recordings have gone down in history, for example the peaks of the 1970s, such as Hector’s, Jukka Tolonen and records made with Wigwam.

An imaginary child the music could not be heard for years, because Kotilainen lost the backing tapes needed for the concert for almost forty years. It wasn’t until the 2010s that the multi-part work was heard live again.

Kuusankoski Kotilainen, who lived until 1991, made a lot of his own music in his own Musapaja in the last years. Among other things, albums were born Turquoise Planet, -51°C, Butterfly meadow, Open, Soivas factory and last in 2021 Dormitory.

Soiva factory was Kotilainen’s autobiographical work, and its music was based on the sounds of paper machines recorded in Kuusankoski.

His father was an axeman at Kymi’s paper mill, whom the boy was supposed to follow. However, the boy ended up becoming a professional musician already in his twenties. Although mainly self-taught, the musician who also received playing lessons from the Hanuri district of the working class ended up earning his salary by playing dance music on the accordion.

He later switched to the Hammond organ and other keyboard instruments, which he played among other things Tamara Lundin in the band, Danny Show and Kitty and Clear in bands.

in the 1970s The native was also heard in progressive rock. He was active for a short time in the bands Wigwam and Tasavallan Presidentti, among others.

Later, at the beginning of the 2000s, Wigwam was reactivated, and Kotilainen joined the team again. The time for the band’s 50th anniversary concerts was in 2018. The President of the Republic later also did some comeback gigs.

Kotilainen continued gigging throughout his life. He was still seen at the age of 70, for example on Hector’s tours and in the band Crazy World.

In 2000, Esa Kotilainen received the Director musics title, which is awarded to distinguished musicians but is rare for rhythm music artists. He was granted an artist’s pension in 2011.