Performers & composers

Jukka Ruohomäki

Jukka Ruohomäki (b. 1947) is a self-taught composer who has specialised almost entirely in electro-acoustic music. He started working in 1970 at the Electronic Music Studio of Helsinki University's Department of Musicology. The studio was founded already in 1961 by Erkki Kurenniemi, and Kurenniemi acted as a guide and a tutor for the young beginner, giving fundamental influences. In the 1970's Ruohomäki made independent compositions as well as music for radio plays, ballet and films.

In the 1980's Ruohomäki was mainly involved with computer graphics and other experimental film work but in 1994, after an almost total silence of 16 years, he started to compose music again. Ruohomäki worked then in his original home town Helsinki, at the Finnish Broadcasting Company's and at the Sibelius Academy's studios. The first real work after the silence, "Scratches" (1995) was successfull in the Bourges international electro-acoustic music competition, and it was performed on the ISCM festival 1997 in Seol, South Korea as well.

In the autumn 1997 Ruohomäki left Helsinki for northern Finland. He started working as lecturer of electronic music in the Conservatory of Oulu. This post is rather unique: the only one in the whole northern Scandinavia. Pure "tape" music is still Ruohomäki's main working area, but various cross-over projects and collaborations with musicians, have recently become more and more common.

CyberSuite (11')

Parts of Cyber Suite (1995-2006)

  • 1. The Shore -
  • 2. Jockey Seq. D -
  • 3. Slow Ice -
  • 4. Sam's Place -
  • 5. Luna Gardens -
  • 6. Neon City Fight

These parts were made during a long period of time. The bulk of the sound materials used here, was made for a radio play, based on William Gibson's famous science fiction novel, the cyber punk classic "Neuromancer". The play was directed by Mikael Sievers and produced by YLE, Finland.

In all, I made some 10-12 hours of sonic landscapes and other stuff, to back up the various scenes of the play. That was in the winter 1994/95, and the project started then: to re-work that colossal amount of material, to make a real composition out of that simple and naive background/elevator music. Finally, Cyber Suite developed into an almost 30 minutes long electro-acoustic work, commissioned by the Tampere Biennale festival and first performed in April 2006, at Särkänniemi planetarium in Tampere, Finland.

The combination at hand now is a preliminary version of Cyber Suite. It was ready in 2004, and it is the main core of the final work. The method used was to edit, develop further, and mix together various original materials. General idea was NOT to estrange the materials to more abstract directions, but on the contrary, to maintain and intensify the original atmospheres. Naivism might be the right word here.