MYTOLOGINEN DUO: GOLDEN AGE

This album definitely is the rarest of very rare Pekka Airaksinen albums! It´s not even mentioned in Discogs, I found only picture of it´s cover in the internet, but for some reason it didn´t show in PA-pages. First time I heard this album even exists was from that great Works-box. Anyway Pekka started to make music only in keyboards in 1975. He recorded then his "Vitamins"-album, but it was released in 1997 as Cdr. In 1976 he formed "Mytologinen Duo" (=Mythological Duo) with Antero Helander and recorded this album and it become he´s only keyboard-base release of seventies. He continued make recordings, but all those released later. In this album he made compositions from some Egypt-pharaohs. Later he started project to make composition of each Buddha´s 1000 incarnations, but I didn´t know, did he finish it. It was so sad he was in Finland those times in the seventies. I believe he would have had at least some underground success for example in the UK, those were same times when Eno started to make his minimalistic experiments with keyboards.

In this album there are two versions for each pharaoh and the first is always made with piano & sax and second with synth & sax. The synth Pekka used is not mentioned, but it sounds VCS3 to me. In "Nut1" piano is playing two notes and insane sax joins into it. Next "Nut2" synth continues same theme Pekka starting to manipulate intresting sounds from his synth. In these both tracks atmosphere really is mythological. "Nut" comes after those and there are more synths. But in "Hehus" atmosphere changes melancholic and continue rest of the album. In "Hehut´s" there come rhythm that continues also in "Kehr´s". Both of these have second part that starts in very low synth sounds and change really weird sounding. A little bit varied theme continues in "Kehrhet" and part 2 of it is the wildest piece in this album. In box there is also additional, 17 minutes long "Afrodite" which I think was recorded from the same sessions. It has great sax & synth playing with many, interesting analog synth sounds.

I am not a big fan of keyboard-base music, so it´s little bit sad, Pekka never came back to his experiments with guitar. But as I have said in some earlier Pekka review, he really could make so interesting music with keyboards that also my interest lasts through all his albums I have. Also Pekka was interested to go forward all of his life, his last works he made with laptop. I believe this album would please all Eno-fans, who like his Airport-album. But also Tangerine Dream fans should check this out. It´s one of the most serene Pekka albums.