Alkuhärkä

After recovering from a long illness I started searching through the shores and woods. I finally managed to locate mr. Anderzén in the middle of an arctic desert. He sat there cross legged, eyes closed, calm as if on top of a mountain or in the bottom of the sea. No trees nor any other objects apart from ourselves interrupted the plain white landscape. Sun dragged itself slowly over the horizon. The air was still. "My retreat will soon be over." His husky voice seemed to emerge from the field of snow itself. I didn't see his lips moving. As I asked about the last nine months he had been away he mumbled something about contemplation. "Remember what Cocteau wrote in Opium about revealing the essence of plants? -I have gained sights of that different kind of speed of vegetation and I have heard the screams of plants he talked about." After six long days of silence spent mostly eating drought reindeer's meat mr A. talked again: "I had this strangest of dreams. There was no space, no people, no traces of action, just this plasmoid machine out of which erupted sounds. And then as I was receiving those aural secretions of an ultra physical automaton from the seventh uppermost world, I woke up due to a butterfly itching in my ear. There I was all covered with sweat, heart beating furiously, yet the ear was empty. It took a long time to be able to sleep after that night."

Heed my words dear friends; that butterfly preserved to the ears of ours which weren't there is Alkuhärkä.

Ralf Normaali

The Wire
Led by Jan Anderzen, Kemialliset Ystävät are the most visible of Finland’s sub-operatives and the most consistently rewarding. They work in short, spooling instrumentals, building layers of simple repetitive riffs into laminal mudcakes and weaving ghosts of folk song into huge tunnels of drone. Alkuhärkä is their latest Fonal release, another entry in an already barely-quantifiable back catalogue. This one sees their sound slightly rewired in a bid to further bolster the electronic element, with several tracks evoking the cracked neon skies of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy as well as the early synth experiments of Asmus Tietchens. But overall the sound is acoustic and communal, albeit occasionally propelled by the kind of tranced rock base that launched previous Scandinavian sound thinkers like International Harvester and Träd Gräs och Stenar straight into space. 18 tracks flit past like landscapes glimpsed from a train: marching band melodies scored for duck calls and bells, huge fields of teleporting percussion, accordion-led music box refrains and heartbreaking almost-songs carried on tides of wordless vocals.
David Keenan