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Music

Influential Finnish Electronic Musician Erkki Kurenniemi Has Died

He passed away yesterday after a long struggle with illness.
Album cover for 'Äänityksiä / Recordings 1963-1973' courtesy of Love Records.

Influential Finnish composer, artist, and synth pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi died yesterday after a struggle with long-term illness. He passed away at a hospital in Helsinki at the age of 75, reports Helsingin Sanomat.

Along with producing multimedia works, films, and electronic compositions, Kurenniemi was also an avid futurist, as well as a roboticist, working for the Finnish company Oy W. Rosenlew Ab and Nokia in that capacity at different points in his life.

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Kurenniemi founded a company called Digelius in 1970 to sell synthesizers of his own creation, which he called DIMI instruments, but it folded the company in 1973 after failing to achieve commercial success.

Simon Reynolds described Kurenniemi as "a hybrid of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Buckminster Fuller, and Steve Jobs" in his 2011 book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction with Its Own Past.

Finnish director Mika Taanila made a documentary about Kurenniemi in 2002, titled The Future is Not What it Used to Be.

Kurenniemi's archives were donated to the Finnish National Gallery in 2006, and some of them are available to peruse on their website.

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