dvd video – Kiasma / Kinotar
The pioneers and the avant-garde electronic musicians have beaten a path that often strayed far from the museums and big institutions. But they have something important to teach: their humble and patient approach, their creativity that ignores the natural limits of the electronic machines by rethinking their functions and developments, their early discovery of hacking and its recontextualizations aimed at fully exploiting its potential. Light years away from the pretentiousness of some contemporary artists and their weak original ideas (but strong public relations abilities), these musicians succeed in bringing back the thrill of discovery, the holy fire of experimentation, the respect and dedication to the materials. This important dvd is dedicated to Erkki Kurenniemi who, since the early sixties, has built electronic musical instruments and has used them to compose, among other things, the soundtracks of his experimental films. This visionary genius developed works such as DIMI-O which, in 1971, used a video camera to capture the motions of a dancer and used them as input for a sequencer, or DIMI-A which, in 1969, was the first musical instrument that used the random contents of the memory as sound samples. The performances recreated at the Kiasma museum of Helsinki, together with the moving concert with Pan Sonic and the precious original materials are a chronological and contextual reconstruction. This is one of the best ways to give the deserved credit to unknown experimenters who really helped advance the history of technological music, testing on themselves the dark sides of the machines, all without ever becoming famous.