Aleksi Eeben

Aleksi Eeben, born 1976, is a lonely composer, electrolorist and punk-programmer currently living somewhere in Finland. He grew up with the music of Chick Corea, Mike Oldfield, Pekka Pohjola and Jean Michel Jarre, and wrote his first own electronic music pieces at age of 8, while exploring the sound capabilities of Commodore 64 and finding the right keys on a little Casio keyboard.

At 15, he was already well-respected by fellow Commodore Amiga hobbyists in various corners of Europe, and known for his bold, adventurous and often crazy style, and technical perfection on the limited platform. "Maybe it was a sort of music school for me, as I never went for any formal musical education. But otherwise, I would gladly forget that specific era in my music. It's the damned Amiga demoscene historians who put my old music freely available on the web and streaming demoscene radios, I never wanted them there. Fuck them!", he smiles kindly, and doesn't reiterate whether he meant fucking the music or the historians.

A little later Aleksi sold his computer and bought his first electric bass, playing a few hours a day, wrote a few short pieces of electronic music at a friend's home studio and occasionally read books on composing and music theory. "Theory appeared to me as a way of making simple things really complex, nothing really inspiring there. I could see descriptive words and patterns of melodic or harmonic 'devices', as they called them, which I had already discovered naturally by ear, instinct or intuition. It didn't bring anything new to my music. Learning an instrument was a great move though. Even thought I am not that proficient in electric bass, and never even played in a band, just playing hours and hours of improvised bass lines and melodies alone has opened a whole new perspective to my musical thinking. I would still like to go exploring further in that direction", Aleksi reveals.

A few years passed and Aleksi found himself studying English Philology at the University of Oulu. Study credits didn't pile up particularly well, but he discovered the very active internet-based communities around Game Boy homebrew development and Commodore 64 music. For Game Boy Color, he wrote the music sequencer "Carillon Editor", which enabled him to write music by simply pushing the buttons on the gaming console itself. Although it was just a programming experiment, some musicians used it to write music for Game Boy games, and some artists in the chip music genre are still using it today for composing and live acts.

"Programming on modern platforms is frustrating and boring, because you don't have complete control over the system. Most of the programming effort goes to browsing API documentation and trying to find the right pieces of ready-made code. Assembly programming on 8- and 16-bit platforms is fundamentally different, it is the ultimate mind exercise really. These machines are so simple that you can understand them completely, and you have precise control over every bit going through the processor and every cycle the processor spends chewing them. You could call it programmer's sudoku or sado-masochistic coding, both describe it quite well. If you are really good, you can create something that is generally though to be impossible. I am far from the best, but I was quite happy when I got my transparent, filled 3D 'glenz' vector box rotating on an unexpanded Commodore VIC 20."

Aleksi's Commodore 64 music editor "John Player" also originates from the time he wasted at the university. "After composing some dozen of tracks on Game Boy, I though about writing music on Commodore 64 too. It was exciting that my childhood computer was so much alive. I didn't want to learn using any existing Commodore 64 sequencer, because they all felt so cumbersome and kind of annoying to me. So I wrote my own", Aleksi comments. "Spaceman Salutes Commodore" on the album "Spaceman Far Away from Home" and also "Water Music", the 18-minute closing track on "Perseverance", were composed using this music editor and yes, they both only have the 3 SID voices playing, nothing else.

In 2002, Aleksi switched his main subject to Computer Science, then quit after two months and landed on a sound designer job at mobile phone manufacturer - nowadays also a so-called internet company - Nokia. At the time of writing he still holds the same cosy day job position there, occasionally creating sounds, some of which can be heard already in up to 800 million devices spread all around the world.

During the next few years, maybe as an early sign of a 30's crisis, Aleksi began pondering the value of his music to himself and also to others. The chip music genre was blooming towards a wider audience, not just retro-computer freaks, and Aleksi started getting fan mail, once again. Chip music enthusiasts had just spotted Aleksi's Game Boy and Commodore 64 tunes from early 2000's, but Aleksi was looking into a different direction already. He listened to all the jazz records he could find and particularly adored the young, upcoming jazz musicians close to his age. "Sometimes when seeing musicians performing on stage, I get totally carried away. It just feels that they are doing something extraordinarily meaningful and magical, out of this world. One such fine moment was seeing Jarmo Savolainen Trio, with Eric Vloiemans on trumpet, playing at Kainuun Jazzkevät some year. Luckily I had my lenses toned dark grey, so no one saw the occasional tear. Same place, another year, listening to Jukka Perko's Viisikko featuring Emma Salokoski was another such experience, where you all of sudden find yourself spilling cider into your sleeve and looking pretty stupid".

One stepstone was when Aleksi watched the internet premiere of "Star Wreck - In the Pirkinning". The calm, but strangely positive closing scene and the fabulous end credits song lifted him to a particularly good mood, and the creation process of the film itself inspired him greatly. It was obvious that Samuli Torssonen and the rest of the Star Wreck core team had just turned what started as a hobby into the first step in their professional, yet for sure passionate career in film making and creating computer generated visual effects. The very same night Aleksi composed the first half of the song "Spaceman Far Away from Home", a highlight on album of the same name.

More tracks followed during the next months and many sleepless nights. "I suddenly realized that my music had a value of its own, and composing music is indeed one of the most pleasurable activities a human can do. Of course I kind of knew that already, but now I had a clear direction. The great sensation of being able to move the notes and melody lines basically anywhere, giving every line a purpose and motivation and creating form became stronger than ever before. I was no longer ashamed of the computer music I wrote in my early teens, but rather, I had discovered a concrete way to start building on that experience."

Aleksi does not really listen much to the music created by other electronic artists. "There's only a few that I really like: Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, Lackluster and U & K", he thinks aloud. For his own music, Aleksi is more likely to seek inspiration from jazz, modern day folk music and progressive rock. "One really good ear-opener was Johanna Juhola's album Miette. Truly fantastic piece of instrumental music. It's not that usual that I listen to an album two times through and still wonder why did it end so soon. And more importantly, it led me to the discovery of many great artists in modern folk and progressive landscape".

Aleksi has since then completed six self-published albums "Spaceman Far Away from Home", "Three Times the Music", "The Four Tales", "The Five Fish Fingers", "Perseverance" and "Space Age Cherokee". There is a seventh one in the making, which will have a theme set around sumo wrestling champions, or it could be that this smart-ass Aleksi is just making fun of the interviewer. All albums are in digital distribution, which he sees as the delivery format of the future. "I only listen to music on computer or iPod. I always transfer new cd's to my computer before even listening to them, because the cd-rom drive makes too much noise. One thing I don't get is why should music enthusiasts accept anything less than cd-quality in digital distribution. There's well enough bandwidth in the world to deliver music albums in a non-lossy audio format, like for example the music store Equal Dreams does."

Asking Aleksi to describe his music makes him a little uncomfortable. "I don't know, one may hear some traces of chip music there, but it is not chip music or chip-music-like music for the sake of chip sounds. The Five Fish Fingers album sounds a bit like chip music, but as you can read in the back sleeve it's fish music, not chip music. I often go for simple waveforms and pure sounds, because they just sound good to me. I rarely use any sampled instruments. They sound like dead and cheap imitations, no matter how many gigabytes is wasted for the samples. I like the honestly synthetic sound of virtual analog synths and prefer using plugins and software instruments only, no outboard gear at all. Why move around heavy objects and mess up the room with cables when you can have it all comfortably inside your laptop? I have no interest in any sort of purism regarding sounds and the sounds itself are not that important in my music. Maybe unlike many electronic artists, I put much weight and effort on the melody. Actually, the underlying harmony is even more important, but don't tell that to melody, she would just feel redundant for no reason."

"When looking back, I can see the same fundamentals in all the music I have ever written. I always try to avoid the obvious, the popular and the stupid. However, any of these work very fine if used as a musical reference, a joke or if they somehow support the larger scale story. Like for the second last track on Perseverance album, Part 8: Chicken, I took the initial chord progression and the arpeggio from my very first composition I could remember, which I made when I was 8 years old or so. It always gives me a smile, even though nobody else would ever get it. And ok, I actually took the liberty of occasionally replacing one chord at the end of the progression. If anything else, I have always avoided anything that is cool. That comes to me naturally since as a person I'm uncool to the very extreme", Aleksi concludes and sits back, indeed looking rather uncool, yet strangely confident.

"There is so much music in the world that has been specifically crafted for reaching the maximum amount of people, creating the maximum amount of money and maximal fame for the artist. It's not wrong, but I don't see that as very fruitful. I would like my music to reach exceptional people only, those who truly are one of a kind. Some of them may be vaguely misunderstood, some have been cast out of society, some become dictators in their sandbox or go crazy, some may be exceptionally successful, some are hiding it all and desperately trying to fit into their social framework, whatever that may be. My music is for you. This doesn't make me exceptional, but I think you are special."