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LP
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ALE 004LP
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2016 repress. Reissue of legendary underground release Buddhas of Golden Light by Pekka Airaksinen, Nurse-With-Wound-listed founding member of legendary Finnish improv group The Sperm. Buddhas of Golden Light is a highly sought-after crate-digger's classic, originally self-released in 1984. Airaksinen originally recorded the album to tape, using an 808 and DX7, with improvised saxophone taken from an epic week-long solo session and Antero Helander featured on one track. Buddhas of Golden Light is a true underground record that sounds like very little else ever made before or since. Simultaneously alarming and disarming, Airaksinen's work co-opts the sound of the 808 and manipulates the DX7 for a cosmic spiritual jam, Sun Ra style. Airaksinen has been actively making music since the 1960s. Buddhas of Golden Light is from a series of albums he began making in the 1980s, each of which is dedicated to one of the thousand Buddhas and many of which were self-released. At the time of this reissue, he is about a hundred Buddhas deep. Airaksinen is mainly known for his role in the controversial Finnish underground group The Sperm, formed in 1967. The collective's recordings resembled the noise and industrial music of the '70s and '80s, with a pro-drug, pro-sexual revolution rhetoric and a Dadaist sense of humor, influenced by American free jazz, underground rock, and anarchism. After The Sperm disbanded in 1970, Airaksinen continued making experimental music in his own studio. His music is characterized by out-of-sync rhythms, intense dynamics, and feverish visions. His approach is consciously unpolished, spontaneous, and improvised, resulting in a cosmic electro-jazz sound fusing free jazz and the 808. In the '90s he began to incorporate techno influences, filtered through his Buddhist philosophy, and he is still making music at the time of this reissue.
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2CD
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LXCD 642CD
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Intense double CD from this avant-garde underground icon from Finland, who recorded solo and with groups like The Sperm (who released one legendary freak out LP, Shh! in 1970), Gandhi-Freud, Ajraxin, etc. Disc one is a historical compilation, featuring mostly the first CD issue of original tracks from 1968-2002. Disc 2 is all new previously unreleased remixes from: Nurse With Wound, Simon Wickham-Smith, Es, Mira Calix, Curd Duca, Anton Nikkila etc. If you were impressed by the Love Records compilation Arktinen Hysteria, this is the next step. "The music of Petta Airaksinen (b. 1945) has been far ahead of its time for most of his 40 year long career. His finest recordings from the 60's are more reminiscent of industrial music and noise (which would emerge ten years later) than of the music of his precursors and contemporaries. In the early 80's few people, if any, were mixing mechanic beats and free jazz like he did -- favourable conditions for this kind of music didn't really exist until the turn of the century. His latest genre-hopping work will also probably take a long time to become fully appreciated. This compilation is a fairly subjective selection of his works from each of these periods. The selection of remixes commissioned for the second disc of the compilation aims to find a contemporary context for his work and to expand connections, some of which already existed. For example Nurse With Wound namechecked Airaksinen on their famous list of influences that came with their debut LP Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979), while Finland's Es played together with Airaksinen in his first live performance since 1987 at Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival in 2001."
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