INNER GALAXIES

Pekka Airaksinen was a key figure in the Finnish underground movement in the late sixties and early seventies with his group The SPERM. Their performances often shook the audience, for example once there was a simulated intercourse on top of grand piano! (Funny, long ago I saw such thing in a cartoon, without knowing that real life happening.) Airaksinen has continued to make electronic / ambient music, having released an enormous number of CD's on his own label Dharmakustannus. This one - from a very productive era of mid-nineties - is the only album I've listened to this far.

Listening to this music brings me echoes of my early twenties (years 1991-93) when I got interested in electronic / New Age music, especially on the German Innovative Communication label. This album would have fit seamlessly into that company, amongst artists such as Software, Robert Schroeder,G.E.N.E., Patrick Kosmos, Richard Wahnfried, etc.

What a suitable title, Inner Galaxies! Very cinematic, introspective and cosmic music but not in the epic scale of Klaus Schulze, or the 70's Berlin school in general, as the music is rather easy to place in the nineties. Most tracks come in average length of 4-6 minutes and don't have much progress in them, dealing a lot with the Ambient Music approach. But they have a wide variety in sonic dynamics, some of them being very rhythmic and percussive, some concenrating on long-lined synth carpets. The longest track 'Of Five Colours' (9:21) has a mythological aura with its hypnotic, slow rhythm pattern and delicate synth layers. Makes me think of STEVE ROACH, ROBERT RICH and JON MARK.

Most of the time this music resonates with the listener's imagination and emotions when given enough concentration, but will most likely feel cold and tiresome to a more casual listener. And anyway there are some tracks that seem merely to be experimenting with electronic sounds without having much to say, e.g. 'The Ship Which Travels on the Bottom of the Sea'.

The two final tracks titled cryptically 'JSSX' and 'JSFF' (JS doubtlessly referring to Johann Sebastian) are Airaksinen's arrangements of Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. Isn't that a Moog? At least these tracks strongly remind me of WALTER CARLOS's seminal work Switched-On Bach (1968). All in all this album offers pretty good samples of the genre but not so original or unforgettable.