My avantgardist folk albums

So, among all other things I have done a trilogy of psychedelic folk albums. Here I will try to explain how they came to and what are their "point",in a way. I think it is worth a mention that all my music includes quite a lot of junk percussion; I roam the trash bins and junkyards and collect empty paint drums, clothes racks, springs and whatever that makes a sound I like, and I also use salt shakers, knives and forks and plates, all kinds of objects I find around my house. I just like it that way, it sounds way more interesting than having a drummer hit hihat with a steady and boring beat. Rhythm is an alive thing. At least it should be.

It all started back in 2014, on Saatana Saa Aina Omansa, Satan Always Gets What's His. This album was not supposed to be an album, it was more or less a collection of something old and something new, but then I took some old songs and translated them into Finnish. It had this strange point,morbid humour and consistency I didn't expect to have in its all weirdness. It got some decent reviews (google is your friend, though most of them were in Finnish I guess) and I, since I was expecting a complete slander and obliteration, being that I had only released grindcore and whatever, was stunned. I didn't play that well, my singing is still as off key as it was back then, but something translates anyhow. So I was curious of what that was.

In 2015 I made this. It is called Lopun Ajan Kansan Lauluja, the Songs of the Endtime Folks, and my first intention was to do it and only release it as a cassette and never put it online. Since I am always broke with too many things going on, I couldn't afford it and got tired of sitting on top of an album I considered to be one of the most important and consistent things I had created by far, I put it online. Then I forgot about it, until in 2016 I had money to make a cassette release out of it, and I kinda gave it another thought. It was insightful. I understood that what I thought to be a little noise, avantgardist folk blues album turned out to be a trip into my own psyche. The concept of the album, though rather loose is a story of a cult that moves into desert to exclude themselves from the world and be closer to God, but all goes south and paranoia takes place, and all ends in flames. It gets darker and darker the further on, and ends with a lone, melancholic guitars with the song Viimeinen Katse Yli Palaneen Maan ( One Last Look Over The Burned Soil). I realized it was a manifest of how I saw the world, the balance between happiness and sadness, darkness and light, that they are always entwined, there was no happiness without a melancholic twist and all the darkness and gloom makes me feel good for some strange, cathartic reasons. It opened up like a flower, showing me the brilliance I had missed the first time around. Not the brilliance of ME ME ME, but the brilliance of the music that had gone through me in the past, it had nothing to do with ME, just how I felt and how my existence was in the context of life in that certain time frame that I inhabited. It is still an important album for me, although some people may find it clumsy and rough. That's ok too.

Ruostuva Maailma/Palava Mieli. The Rusting World / A Burning Mind. After Lopun Ajan Kansan Lauluja I felt like I could do nothing worth my own interest. Then I decided to build an album in a different way. From the concept up. I decided to make an album that is a circle, a living breathing thing, not only that the songs breathe, but the whole album has rhythms of noise and silence, loudness and quietism, minimalism and some strange form of low key epic that my songs sometimes grow into. The first song was supposed to be a conceptual liner note (having the listener go "oh, he is just all out of ideas, rehashing the same album structure and repeating the same thing all over!" - and then have the second song, which actually destroys the "old world" and makes way for this rusty, screeching and gloomy new world that follows) a glimpse into something old before it all collapses into noise. The noise is made with only acoustic instruments, Kantele played with a bow, springs and paint drums and with an actual train turning device! If Lopun Ajan Kansan Lauluja was pre-apocalyptic folk, this hits the apocalypse and then becomes post-apocalyptic by definition. It has sides A and B which both end with Kyyn Tie (Adder's Way). And that was actually what got me thinking when I was making the album. I realized I had done it again. I was staring at another mirror, this time a psychoanalytic one that dove into the primordial mud of my psyche, into my childhood, to the swamps I used to play, into those pinewoods that were my world when I was four or five. The rusting world is the world of a summer evening, everything is rusting in the golden light that bleeds down the pines like they were stabbed. The snake itself was a symbol of myself, I was born in 1989, which was the year of the snake in the Chinese horoscope, through which I identify my childhood self with a snake. It is a psychological image of my childhood. I have done a thorough work on my subconscious, but I'll get to that later on. The album showed me how I myself saw my childhood; most of it I spent both in awe of the fleeting, fragile beauty of the existing moments, bees, flowers, birds, trees, summer and seasons changing, and on the other side I felt like my flesh is a prison I can't escape. These still apply as much as they did back then, although I can cut myself some slack now, when I have some tools to cope with these emotions and thoughts. But back then they felt overwhelming, as the consciousness of a child usually feels. With this album I think I reached something of that, something I didn't even remember that existed in me. It is a conceptual album about a consciousness and how it works, rusting slowly trapped inside of me. It may seem bleak, but it was actually called somewhat comforting in a review, so I hope it may offer some comfort. I still have some CD's of them left, it comes with an 8 page booklet and full colored artwork. It's 5 euros and mail, so it's not that expensive I guess..