Tip! 2025 Stock. In the early 1960s, while Robert Moog was still perfecting his voltage-controlled synthesizers in upstate New York, a young Finnish physicist named Erkki Kurenniemi was building an entirely different future in a basement studio at the University of Helsinki. Working with digital control technology years before the rest of the world caught on, Kurenniemi created instruments that seemed to arrive from a parallel timeline - synthesizers played with electronic pens, machines that transformed brainwaves into sound, devices that made music from the electrical resistance between human bodies touching.

Rules gathers the foundational works from this singular mind, recorded between 1963 and 1975. The title derives from Kurenniemi's own compositional manifesto, a set of guidelines as radical as they are poetic: 1. A work has to be completed in a single day. 2. Consecutive sounds must be chosen so that they are totally inconsistent or surprising and have no rational relationship with each other. 3. ...?

That unfinished third rule speaks volumes. Kurenniemi was never interested in closure, in systems that didn't leave room for the unknown.

The centerpiece remains On-Off from 1963 - his first and, by his own admission, best electronic composition, inspired by a power station, its title reflecting his vision of a future music studio requiring only an on/off switch. Antropoidien Tanssi (Dance of the Anthropoids), created using his own Andromatic synthesizer, later surfaced in a collaboration with Finnish prog legends Wigwam. The two-part Saharan Uni (Dream of the Sahara), realized with Kari Hakala, and Inventio-Outventio, a Bach deconstruction with Jukka Ruohomäki, demonstrate a mind in constant dialogue with collaborators and history alike.

Simon Reynolds described Kurenniemi as a Finnish hybrid of Stockhausen, Buckminster Fuller and Steve Jobs. The comparison is apt but insufficient. Kurenniemi was also a robotics designer, a futurologist who believed our true descendants would be algorithms, and a man who spent decades archiving his entire existence in preparation for digital resurrection in 2048.

Newly transferred from original master tapes at 192kHz/24bit resolution. This music has waited half a century to sound this present.