With Sähkömies, Jimi Tenor released his legendary solo debut in 1994 on Puu, a spin-off of the Finnish label Sähkö Recordings founded by Tommi Gronlund and Mika Vainio in 1993. Recorded in Tenor's former home in New York, the album offers a previously unheard mixture of drum machine driven, electronic sounds and Sun Ra-inspired jazz. Written, recorded and produced entirely by Tenor in his apartment, the pieces have lost none of their spontaneous, roughcast charm to this day. The record combines lo-fi electronics with Jimi Tenor's typical smoky saxophone playing, offering a fascinating listening experience that documents an artist who is full of curiosity and the joy of experimentation. For the 30th anniversary of Sahkomies, Bureau B is thrilled to make this special album available again.
"How did this idea of a solo album come about after you had previously played mainly with your band Jimi Tenor And His Shamans? Jimi Tenor: I had no intention whatsoever to do a solo album. I was planning to become a photographer since I realized that trying to survive making music like Jimi Tenor And His Shamans would be hard. In Germany we could have played some gigs, but at that point my confidence in a career in music was super low. I had a job as a tourist photographer, so I was able to buy photo equipment and also some drum machines and synths. I bought an Oberheim DX and a Roland 606. My girlfriend Tiina Huczkowski was doing dance performances in a club called El Sensorium. The club was run by a group of young people from Argentina and it was mostly like a pop up club. It would happen in various venues. A very arty club. I loved it. So I made music for those dance performances. I recorded them with my ghettoblaster on cassettes. Hearing my music in a club PA-system gave me confidence. It sounded really good! At that time, Tommi Grönlund and Matti Knaapi were doing a project called Ambient Radio. It was a temporary FM radio that would play non stop ambient music. They needed a lot of original music for that project. Tommi had heard some of my music for Tiina's performances and asked me to send as much music as possible to be used in the ambient project. It was a very liberating task because I thought that almost any artsy music could be considered ambient. So I sent Tommi a lot of material. I had plenty, because I was doing recordings in my home studio almost every day. I had recently bought my first sequencer that could run a Korg MS20. It was fascinating. My own electronic music studio! Some weeks after the ambient project Tommi called me and said he might want to release an album of some of my tapes. Of course I was excited. A great thing was that I was in the US and Tommi was in Finland. I had zero input in the track selection. I know I would have chosen the wrong tracks and that would have been it for my music career." - Daniel Jahn & Jimi Tenor, March 202
