ARKTINEN HYSTERIA: SUOMI-AVANTGARDEN ESIPUUTARHUREITA

This compillation gives a nice overview for the Finnish 1960's/1970's scene of the most far-out pop avantgarde experiments. My personal favourite here is the "Kaukana Väijyy Ystäviä" ("The Friends are Stalking in The Distance") by Sähkökvartetti (Electric Quartet), where M.A.Numminen bellows over the loud and shocking noises of audiogenerator designed by Erkki Kureniemi. M.A.Numminen described their European performances done with this set on some interviews, and he told that in some East-European country the audience started escaping the concert in panic and the electricity was cut down. He concidered this as one of his greatest achievements ever. Both gentlemen mentioned here are also appearing in other tracks of the album; The disc starts with "Eleitä Kolmelle Röyhtäilijälle" ("Gestures for Three Burpers") led by M.A.Numminen, which is a really disgusting piece of music to listen, surprisingly concisting a collection of burpings by the performers. There's also a song "Antropoidien Tanssi" ("Dance of The Anthropoids"), from which a short excerpt was used on Wigwam's second album as an intro for the song "Frederic and Bill". This was an idea by the producer of that record Kim Fowley, possibly trying to add freak-out elements to that album. The complete version of this song is really weird installation, containing interesting sounding trashy analog computer sounds, running trough an algorythmic composition in a foreing sounding tonal scales. The composition is performed with the Electric Quartet, which was actually the name of the analog electric musical instrument built by Kureniemi (the name came from the four different "instruments" of the device, all delivering really "pleasant" sounds). The other most memorable tracks here are the weird experimentation of Blues Section, "Shivers of Pleasure" which was the B-Side of their Jimi Hendrix sounding hit song "Hey Hey Hey". There are also two tracks of the music of the group Sperm here, a rare cut from their first EP aiming succesfully for whip-out music, and excerpts from the scenery of "Kuoleman puutarha" (The Garden of Death"), which probably won't document the complete performance very well, as it contained theater elements, and films would have cleared out better what the unclear noises meant on the overall context. I believe a photograph of the set is on the album cover, which booklet contains quite definite descriptions of the studied subject. For a casual listener of "coherent" music this disc won't bring much pleasure, but anybody interested of this kind of stuff and the underground pop scene of 1960's/1970's Finland this is an interesting disc probably.