First Wave is the second book based on electronic music composer and musicologist Petri Kuljuntausta's exhaustive research on the history of early Finnish electronic music. The project started more than ten years ago as a radio programme. Old, unreleased tapes digitised for the programme inspired Kuljuntausta to publish a CD with the support of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in 2002, but the liner notes expanded into an 800-page book, On/Off – Eetteriäänistä sähkömusiikkiin (On/Off: From Ether Sounds to Electronic Music; Kuljuntausta Reference Petri2002). First Wave is a continuation of the same research, but this time under an academic framework – while On/Off was a free-form chronicle, First Wave is a doctoral dissertation with a theoretical framework and a stricter approach. Moreover, while On/Off was written in Finnish, First Wave is in English and thus opens the subject to a wider public.

The more academic nature of First Wave is immediately evident when skimming through the contents page: in addition to a prologue, there is now a lengthy second chapter ‘On methodology and research of music history’. This chapter investigates the concept of the avant-garde (2.1), the nature of music historical research and the status of electronic music in Finnish history research (2.2), text-based history study and microhistorical research (2.3), sources and the source-critical approach (2.5), and data collection and analysis (2.6). In chapter 2.4 the research questions are defined as follows: ‘When did electronic music arrive in Finland? Who were the first Finnish electronic music composers? What kinds of electronic compositions did they create? Where were these works realized? And when and where were these works played in public[?]’. After laying out its foundations in chapter 2, the book plunges into the nitty-gritty of historical research from page 53 onwards.

The third chapter of the book goes through the composition environments of Finnish electronic music and the technological developments relevant to these, including the arrival of electronic music instruments. It charts the arrival of the electronic music concepts to Finland, along with their aesthetic development and relation to radio plays. It goes through the connections between Finnish composers and the international avant-garde and how all of these issues appeared in the Finnish media. The fourth and longest chapter goes through the composers most relevant to the first wave one by one. Finally, the main body of the book ends with a 12-page epilogue on p. 299, and the last 131 pages consist of various appendices – for instance lists of compositions, radio programmes and magazines, a selection of pictures, a lengthy and useful bibliography and an index.

It is a shame that, unlike On/Off, a CD does not accompany the book – after all, familiarising oneself aurally with the musical works in question is an absolute must in order to animate the topics under discussion. For example, Erkki Kurenniemi's On-Off and Erkki Salmenhaara's White Label stand out as uniquely primordial and hard-hitting compositions in comparison to the mainstream of European electroacoustic music of their time – only through listening can one appreciate how close these works were to later industrial/noise/lo-fi aesthetics already in 1963. The On/Off CD is a suitable and necessary accompaniment for this book as well.

The approach of the book is marked by thoroughness and meticulous attention to detail. Kuljuntausta's research has been impressively comprehensive: he has left no stone unturned in his attempt to recover every lost tape recording and the details of all the radio programmes, magazine articles and reviews relevant to the subject. Pouring masses of this data on the reader makes the history come alive in a seemingly objective and often appealing way, as a great number of quotations are left to speak for themselves. However, this approach is a two-edged sword, as the book's exhaustiveness tends to exhaust the reader, appearing at times dry and overly pedantic. Also, due to the book's microhistorical approach, Kuljuntausta seems to avoid broad sweeping looks on the big picture outside of Finland – international connections are discussed only when a direct line of influence can be traced. Hence the Darmstadt school and particularly Stockhausen are discussed numerous times at length, but what was happening elsewhere in Europe is barely touched on. For example, even a brief comparison between the politics of electronic music in Finland and its close neighbour Sweden would have provided the book with some additional colour and depth.

The occasional dryness of the matter-of-fact presentation is reinforced by two separate issues relating to language and organisation of content. Firstly, the text has a strong aura of English as a second language. Explicit mistakes are frequent and the general fluency of the language is far inferior to that of On/Off. Secondly, partly due to the fact that the content is separated into different overlapping themes, Kuljuntausta returns to the same work, event, article or other issue time and time again, sometimes revealing something new, sometimes not. This unusually high amount of repetition makes reading the book from start to finish a somewhat jerky experience. However, this is probably not what Kuljuntausta intended in the first place, and the book seems to work better as reference material, where the reader can select a section of interest and read it in isolation. Still, even this does not explain all the choices of organisation: for example, in the chapter on Bengt Johansson (4.3), his piece Three Electronic Studies is discussed several times at length before the actual subheading dedicated to the piece. The combination of these three issues renders the book an unnecessarily arduous read.

With that said, the value of Kuljuntausta's painstaking research cannot be stressed enough. Electronic music has been markedly underrepresented in writings of Finnish music history, and much of this material had been practically forgotten before Kuljuntausta's work. Furthermore, five of the thirteen composers selected for scrutiny have died since Kuljuntausta started his research, and, with tapes and other material being lost or destroyed as time passes, the time for this research was ripe to say the least. Kuljuntausta quotes Finnish historian Pentti Renvall's statement that ‘the past exists only through the present information on it’ (p. 309) – indeed, with his research, Kuljuntausta has reanimated a past that was almost nonexistent in the Finnish collective consciousness. Also, even though the subject matter would not normally be considered as part of the ‘grand narrative’ of the history of electronic music, this can paradoxically give it a special interest. Studying the microhistory of a seemingly out-of-the-way place like Finland can give fresh perspective on the well-established macrohistory of electronic music. The book might be a heavier read than the casual reader would wish, but it is without doubt the definitive reference on its subject available in English.