J.O. Mallander

In honour of the recent 80th birthday of Finnish conceptual art pioneer and counterculture icon J.O. Mallander, private recordings from the artist’s personal archive have now been made available for the first time. Known primarily as a visual artist, art critic and gallerist, Mallander has also made forays into poetry and sound art, and his recorded output enjoys cult-classic status among Finnish avant-garde and experimental music aficionados. At the tail end of the sixties, while collaborating with Pekka Airaksinen & co. in the legendary music/performance collective Sperm, Mallander recorded two EP’s that both toyed with the recontextualization and modification of pre-existing recordings. This LP features outtakes from the sessions of the 1970 EP Decompositions, a release characterized by tape manipulation, looping and primitive turntablism (later showcased in Ursula Block’s and Michael Glasmeier’s art-record compendium Broken Music). Included are also two alternative versions of the sound piece In Reality, originally commissioned by Swedish art collective Fylkingen for the 1970 Text/Ljud festival in Stockholm.

Mallander was, like Airaksinen, strongly influenced by Buddhism and the sixties counterculture movement, but was also up to date on Fluxus and other emerging trends in contemporary art. In these recordings he transmutes and “decomposes” his favorite jazz tunes into found-art objects marked by a comic Neo-Dada sensibility – equal parts conceptual sound art, Burroughsian cut-up, counterculture prank and the absurdism of a Zen koan. The use of repetition turns showtunes into sound poetry, humor colliding with a curious pop culture spirituality evoked by a looped voice crooning the word “reality…reality…reality…”. 

Includes liner notes by art historian Marko Home and labels hand-printed by the artist himself.