Nurse With Wound's famous Influence List included in the sleeve notes for their debut LP Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table...has created endless frustration in my life, leading me to spend far toomuch trolling used record sites and online auctions looking to completemy NWW List collection. My goal is to own at least one record from eachof the artists listed, which has frequently seemed an unattainablegoal, the list jam-packed with hopelessly arcane one-offs released intiny editions on small European labels throughout the 60's and 70's.Approaching the task scientifically, I began at the alphabeticalbeginning of the list. No problem there, I was easily able to trackdown Spalax CD reissues of the first few Agitation Free albums; but thesecond artist on the list, Pekka Airaksinen, had me stumped for years.There was nothing I could do but move on to Airway and pretend that Ididn't care about this Finnish avant-garde obscurity. I later found outthat Airaksinen was the main artistic force behind The Sperm — thecreators of the fabulously rare Shh! LP — who also appear lateron the list. As if to answer my insane record-collector prayers,Finland's Love Records have issued this double-disc compilation Madam, I'm Adamto serve as the first widely-available introduction to PekkaAiraksinen's long and fruitful career as one of Finland's most prolificavant-garde electronic artists. Disc one compiles various highlightsstretching from 1968 to 2002 under various guises including The Sperm,Gandhi-Freud and Ajraxin. For disc two, a group of artists from Europeand the UK were invited to contribute reinterpretations of Airaksinen'smusic, the tracklist mirroring that of the first disc. The Sperm'suniquely architectural noise-rock presages industrial music, and attimes - as on the beautifully oppressive "Korvapoliklinikka Hesperia" —shows similarities to future envelope-pushers Dead C and Sunn O))). AsAiraksinen progressed into his 70's period, heavy distortion andimprovised passages of shambling, distorted chaos were soon replaced bya new emphasis on electronic instrumentation and rhythms.Gandhi-Freud's "Molybdene" utilizes synthesizers to create a grainystructure of lopsided arpeggiations. From this point forward,Airaksinen seems to be interested in the myriad possible manifestationsof electronic music, from the odd, I Ching-derived mathematical timesignatures of his early 80's work on the Roland 808, to his currentexploration of techno and ambient musics, all impregnated with hisrabidly uncommercial aesthetic and rigorous application of conceptualstructure. The remixes on the second disc attempt to find contemporaryapplications for Airaksinen's ideas, from the hallucinogenic,post-Timbaland rhythmic interpolations of Nurse With Wound, to theobnoxiously uninteresting digital hardcore of Philipp Quehenberger.Mira Calix contributes a remix of The Sperm that inexplicably buriesthe track under a poorly-executed synthesized orchestral. Along theway, Simon Wickham-Smith and Airaksinen himself turn in mildlyinteresting hijackings of the original works. Most appallingly for arare-music addict, the liner notes directed me towards Pekka's ownwebsite for his Dharmakustannus CD-R label, where for a premium of 20 Euros a pop, you can own everything from his extensive back catalog. Madam I'm Adamdelivers on its stated goals: a reasonably priced introduction to thehistory and continued influence of one of the underground's most uniquebodies of work.samples:
- Gandhi-Freud - Molybdene
- The Sperm - Korvapoliklinikka Hesperia
- Ajraxin - No Focus (Nurse With Wound remix)
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