Disc review | In the 1970s, the synthesizer was a cool tool of the future, which was used to even promote the sale of orange juice

Electronic music / album

Osmo Lindeman: Electronic Works. Electric.

★★★★

Helsinki pianist and composer Osmo Lindeman in his thirties, he was on the rise, as he had already received two Jussi awards for new types of film scores, of which the latter was particularly praised. That's what he had done in a crime comedy Gas, inspector Palmu (1961), at the beginning of which a rich widow is found dead in her apartment.

Even the first glittering minutes of the film in the stairwell of a prestigious building in southern Helsinki are memorable – equally thanks to the music that complements the story, the sped-up pianos and the menacing organ.

Lindeman, who graduated from the Sibelius Academy in 1959, also composed music for two other Matti Kassilan to steer to Palmu as well as a few other feature films.

With jazz However, Lindeman (1929–1987), who started his career and recorded lattar music in the 1950s, soon put aside movies and threw himself into making experimental contemporary art music. Until he rejected that too.

As a composer and musician, in his last phase he still devoted himself to strange electronic music – various beeps, gurgles and whirrings and jerks.

As their author, he did not reach a large film audience, but an even larger television audience. In his home studio, Lindeman worked with his machines on, among other things, the signature music that Yle used for a long time on TV news in the 1970s.

You can listen to and see the ID of Yle Areena's TV IDs in the composition. The theme composed by Lindeman appears in section 00.10.

Now this mark completes the double disc, on which a large part of his electronic musical works is collected for the first time. Almost 80 minutes Electronic Works is also the first album released under Lindeman's name. The previous album is a single Latin American (1956), with which the pianist and his “assisting rhythm group” perform boleros and mambas.

There aren't any of them by Electronic Works in eleven songs there are even echoes, and I don't even remember rhythm music. As a contemporary electronic music connoisseur, Lindeman was interested in various “kinetic forms”, such as the collection Kinetic Forms (1969) and Mechanical Music For Stereophonic Tape (1969) make it known at the very beginning.

But what turned the head from acoustic to electronic, made 1968 move completely to machine music? Lindeman, who has taught at the Sibelius Academy since 1961, had by then already composed concertos, chamber music and orchestral works, as well as two symphonies.

The university lecturer who wrote the in-depth cover text for the album Mikko Ojanen suspects that one of the reasons is job laxity; the musicians were unable to satisfactorily perform his latest works.

The machines in the home studio, on the other hand, obeyed the composer and fulfilled all his wishes – at least for a while. Lindeman's last known work is commissioned by Yle and concludes the album Spectacle (1974), which features a rare novelty instrument, the Minimoog synthesizer. The first one had been brought to Finland only the previous year by a musician Esa Kotilainenwho had paid for it as much as a new small car.

At the core of Lindeman's works is still the Finnish DICO synthesizer, which he had already ordered for himself in 1968 from the inventor and instrument builder Erkki from Kurenniemi.

Excellent Electronic Works completes the history of Finnish electronic music for him as well. And at the same time open your ears to the musical world, where the synthesizer was such a cool tool of the future that in the 1970s they even tried to promote the sale of orange juice and growing peat: the ones that ended up on the album Sunk and Finnish-Humus are the music of television commercials.