H.S. Tuominen - Talvi CD

H.S. Tuominen - Talvi CD 

The digipak is sealed and has very light age / dust (foxing) stains. 

"Harri S. Tuominen lives quietly as a lens grinder. In the evenings he still occasionally goes on sorting out his recording archives that include some of the most substantial Finnish experiments in pop music of the 1980’s. At the time he put out a patch of cassette albums in editions of less than 50. This far they have only been in the knowledge of his closest circle of friends.

Talvi is the most fully formed and elaborated of Tuominen’s albums. It was put together in 1982 when he lived in a small village away from his native Helsinki. His band Vessel Umpio – they played fragile and vibrant post punk and put out three mostly self-released records – had split a year before and he had found work in the countryside. There he had a lot of free time to work on his musical ideas with a 4-track reel-to-reel, Yamaha CS-15 synthesizer, a home-made electric guitar, a violin his uncles gave him, a melodica and a toy piano.

“I wanted to discard limitations set by genre and instrumental ability and base my work purely on ideas. The record also reflects my mental tuning of the time: the doors and the windows are wide open, one floats in the stream of thoughts and ‘H.S.Tuominen’ only works as a tag to root it all, however minimally, into the shared reality”, Tuominen explains.

Talvi can still gently distort the fabric of reality. It moves in a snowy landscape with discretion and calm, and the music seems to take a new face on every listen. Tuominen’s mumbly baritone and fragmented lyrics are reminiscent of the excentric pop songs of The Residents, whereas melodies pass thru the sweet, cloudy territories of Brian Eno’s ambient recordings, occasionally even anticipating the early cassette recordings of Aphex Twin. The last instrumental tracks on Talvi feel very evasive, almost holy: as if the physical existence and measurable time were slowly fading away, finally to disappear.” – Juuso Paaso

recorded during 1982, originally released as cassette album, January 1983.