About Me
Petri Kuljuntausta is a composer, performer and sound artist. He is famous for music composed of sounds both natural and extraordinary. In close collaboration with natural scientists, he has made music out of whale calls and the sounds of the northern lights and composed an underwater installation from underwater materials. In many ways Kuljuntausta's art is based on good knowledge of tradition; environmental sounds, live-electronics, improvisation and collaborations with media artists has influenced him as a composer. He remix the material live and turn it all to the new dimensions with his electronics and feedback devices. Kuljuntausta’s recent composition project Northern Lights LIVE, based on soundscapes of the northern lights and feedback sounds, was performed at the ISEA2004 festival, 12th Symposium on Electronic Arts. The work was a vivid collaboration between art and science, recycling original field recordings of the phenomena as well as processing aurora borealis sounds. A forty-five minute long continuous audio-visual dialogue between nature's own soundscapes and their digitally altered, urban noise-art substitutes were created on stage.Kuljuntausta has composed digital music for experimental films, visual art and dance projects, and made media and sound installations in museums, galleries and concert halls. His works has been performed in many European countries, Australia and the USA, and he has made recordings for various labels in Australia, England, Finland, France, Germany and the USA. Kuljuntausta has performed or collaborated with Morton Subotnick, Atau Tanaka, Richard Lerman, Markus Reuter, David Rothenberg, Sami van Ingen, and many others.Petri Kuljuntausta is the author of the 'On/Off', the definitive history of Finnish electronic music, and 'eXtreme Sound' (Äänen eXtreme), a review of the whole experimental scene and on his own approach to music. His dvd (2006) contains massive amount (9 hours) of his compositions and live performances from the years 1994-2005. In 2004 Star's End and Inner Space radio shows selected Kuljuntausta's 'Momentum' as one of the most significant cd release of the year. He is one of the most celebrated electronic artists in Finland. Recently he won an award, The Finnish State Prize for Art, from the Finnish government as a distinguished national artist for 2005.
