The album most people mean when they say Wigwam, and the one where Jukka Gustavson takes over. It is also the end of the band’s first configuration.

The short version

Recorded at two Helsinki studios between February and November 1973 and released on Love Records in February 1974, ‘Being’ is a gatefold album with a booklet — in English, with a Finnish translation included, which settles the question of what language the band sang in. Måns Groundstroem produced and engineered it, before joining as bassist the following year. Jukka Gustavson wrote five of the ten tracks including a co-write, and took the art direction. It is the last Wigwam album for both Gustavson and Pekka Pohjola.

One writer takes the wheel

On the two previous albums Jukka Gustavson and Jim Pembroke had shared the record roughly evenly. Here Gustavson dominates: half the tracks are his, and the album’s design and direction are his too. The result is the most compositionally dense record the band made, with a large woodwind section including a flute soloist and arrangements that behave more like written music than like rock arrangements. Both Gustavson and Pohjola left after it, taking the long-form writing with them, so this album is simultaneously the peak of one version of Wigwam and the last document of it.

The sound

This is densely composed, woodwind-shaded symphonic prog, and the density is deliberate. The keyboards are layered with Minimoog and VCS 3 alongside piano and organ, the woodwinds are written into the structures rather than laid over them, and Pohjola’s bass functions as a melodic voice throughout. Pembroke’s contributions are shorter and sharper and act as relief. The record has long been described as the band’s masterpiece, though that framing comes from general reference rather than from any named critic, and it is fairer to say it is the album on which their ambitions are most fully realised.

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The songs

‘Proletarian’ opens the album and is one of Gustavson’s. ‘Pedagogue’ is the longest track at nearly ten minutes and the album’s central composition. ‘Planetist’ is Pekka Pohjola’s contribution and the clearest showcase for his writing before he left for a solo career. Between them they cover the album’s two poles — extended structural writing and the melodic instrumental sense that Pohjola took with him.

Reception and legacy

Reference sources describe ‘Being’ as the album most often called Wigwam’s masterpiece, though without attribution to a named critic, and no chart or sales data is accessible. What the record demonstrably did was travel: it was reissued in Sweden in 1980, in Japan in 2009, in Britain in 2010, and repeatedly on vinyl since 2014, and was re-engineered from the original eight-track masters and remastered in Helsinki in 2001. For an album sung in English by a Finnish band on a Finnish independent label, that is unusual reach.

The verdict

This is the Wigwam album to own if you own one for the music rather than for the songs. It is the most ambitious, the most carefully written and the most rewarding on repeat listening, and the woodwind writing alone distinguishes it from almost everything else in Nordic progressive rock. It is also the least immediate: Pembroke’s wit is rationed here, and the record asks for attention it does not court. Anyone who came to Wigwam through the later, poppier albums should approach it knowing that this is a different band, one album earlier and a good deal more serious.

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