Finland 5

I know I know, every picture from Finland so far has been of Moomins, but isn't a peroxide blond bad boy also a beloved character from your childhood?

On to the bands...

Astrid Swan and the Drunken Lovers- First band I saw of the festival. Tart and catchy new wave-laced pop, but Ms. Swan's sparkly dress got diminished considerably by the dudes in her band wearing bowler hats. It set an unfortunate trend for mis-matched band outfits.

Downstairs- Blame it on the lead singer's beard, but this band reminded me of Les Savy Fav. Their band blurb though references: "The Fall or early Bad Seeds with a sound that has been compared to NWA and Shellac." Uh...no.

Miss Saana and the Missionaries- Retro throwback from a 15-person ensemble. Miss Saana had the pipes (think Bassey and Staton) to not get lost in the string quartets, backing singers, horn section and a dreadlocked organist, but how can she pay all these folks though?

Cosmobile- An oi band before they got broadband, allowing them to download their new influences: Green Day, Talking Heads, Vampire Weekend. Another friend made a game out of guessing what their influences were for each and every song. He heard lots of Paul Simon.

Plain Ride- Was told that this band was the Smog of Finland and they do have roots in Circle, which should've been a good thing. But Finnish dudes singing about "the bayou" is not a good thing. Lead singer is draped in Jeff Tweedy's flannel, there's a total long-hair hesher guitarist, and a keyboardist in a black turtleneck, but in the end, they sound like George Thorogood: "B-b-b-b-bad."

Joensuu 1685- Every single person I encountered at the Lost in Music Festival, locals and international guests alike, insisted that I catch this trio, who were billed as being along the lines of Jesus & Mary Chain and Spacemen 3, meaning pouty, trance-inducing psych noise cloaked in heavy reverb. Such word of mouth also guaranteed that the entire city was seemingly packed into the club for their performance. The androgynous look of their lead singer had me hoping that a woman might be unleashing such a roar, but alas. A decent enough band, but when they blew a fuse onstage, it broke the spell for me and I missed their cover of "I'm On Fire." Which leads to the Catch-22 of the music scene here, or anywhere up and coming. If you sing in your native tongue, you run the risk of remaining only in your niche market. But if you switch to English, you are then a third-tier simulacra of bigger bands, like, JAMC and S3.

Regina- Seeing this trio gave me great hope that there might be something good brewing here. Solid grooves and well-crafted breaks inform their sleek dance-pop. Even singing in their native tongue (save for one song which had Indian war whoops, which I did understand) couldn't stop them from being the most intriguing and catchy band I caught all weekend.

Reckless Love- For as much as Finland's indie rock scene would like to forget, the biggest rock band to come out of Finland remains Hanoi Rocks. While most of the delegates attention is turned elsewhere, one night we decide to dabble in the heavy metal showcases, meaning we are the only men in a room full of hot Finnish women squeezed into black leather, spandex and sparkles, hip-swaying to Reckless Love.
Clad in similar outfits themselves, the band sang "I Love Rock'n'Roll" in Finnish and then proceeded to made eye contact with every woman in the room during "Beautiful Woman." It's as if Use Your Illusion never came out and Brett Michaels never had to resort to doing Rock of Love, as Poison still ruled the airwaves. It's as if Nirvana, hip-hop, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Radiohead never happened, or at least, never reached Finland. Wait, is that a bad thing?

Finland 4

One night while I was in Finland, I found myself seated at an event I would never in my right mind have attended back in the United States: a music industry awards ceremony. And yet there I was, subjected to all the free Jägermeister I could tuck away for three hours and an MC that looked like NBA star Tony Parker dressed up as Andre 3000 for Halloween.

The table I'm seated at won two awards and the statuettes looked like this:

Which in a way sums up the Finnish music industry: blocky, unpolished, not quite gold. For convenience's sake, let's just group Finland in with its Scandinavian brethren (leaving Estonia and Russia out of it) and ask why the Finns lag behind Sweden and Norway in musical exports. Seated at the table with me are a few members of said industry. Sweden is simple: starting with the massive success of ABBA in 1975, they've grown into the third largest music industry. To rattle off the artists who hail from here is a fool's task, but so ubiquitous are its talents that even our own chart-toppers are often propped up by their productions and studios.

And at least on an indie-rock level, Norway's crested in the past decade: Röyksopp, Annie, Turbonegro, Kings of Convenience,  Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, etc. while whole subcultures like space disco and black metal are cultivated and nurtured there (and then there is 80's one-hit wonder, a-ha). But for most of my trip, I was hard-pressed to name famous Finnish acts beyond Luomo/ Vladislav Delay, Pan Sonic, and Jimi Tenor. Do any of them count as "famous" though? For a country of roughly-similar size, why does Norway outpace Finland?

One of my tablemates works for the Finnish Music Information Centre, and she informed me that Finland's breakout year actually occurred back in 2000, when three acts took Europe by storm: HIM, Bomfunk MCs, and Darude:

Conveniently enough, I was traveling through Europe at that time and remember all three acts very well. So my reply went something like this: "They were all Finnish?!"

For whatever reason, each act lent itself to anonymity or a misconstruing of their roots. HIM surely must have arisen in Sweden, while Bomfunk MCs were such a heinous strain of hip-hop that surely it must have been the Germans who got it all so horribly wrong. I mean blond dreads, jeeeesus. Darude was the number one song the duration of my trip, it seemed. Hearing it everywhere made me wonder why the US pop charts hasn't had an instrumental number one in decades (can anyone out there tell me what the last one was? My mind said "Axel F," yet it only reached #34 in the US). It took years before I heard "Sandstorm" stateside, but it was at Yankee Stadium, so it's at least crept into the subconscious.

Since then, the industry has admittedly been hard-pressed to follow up on that success, with only HIM being something you could really hang future expectations on. But what sort of act would it take for Finland to be back on the map? While we pondered that at the table, we were treated to the sounds of this band (I shit you not):

Finland 3

Since the Sibelius symphonies I checked out from the New York Public Library were too scratchy to play, my main impression of what the music of Finland sounds like remains the wondrously inscrutable Fonal imprint. In years previous, I had written about artists such as Lau Nau and even gave an overview of their folk scene for the Nashville paper, but hadn't quite kept up with their releases since then.
Before I left, I again pulled out the works of Kemialliset Ystävät, Paavoharju, Islaja, and ES and uploaded them to my iPod, providing an alternating soundtrack of blissed-out and jarring sounds. What I played again and again though was this double album by ES, Sateenkaarisuudelma, which was just sublimely idyllic for watching the pines and birches flicker past on the landscape. Steeped in the sounds of Harmonia and Popol Vuh (at least to these ears), it's one of the most beautiful minimal albums of the decade.

Arriving in the city of Tampere for the Lost in Music Festival, I wondered if I might somehow see acts such as these. Instead, I braced myself for what I knew to be a weekend of metal and attempted indie-rock, rather than the weirdo, introverted, idiosyncratic music that Fonal trades in (and that I am magnetically drawn towards).
As luck would have it though, the man behind ES, Sami Sänpäkkilä, is also the man behind the label itself. And while my impression was that the Fonal folks lived under giant mushroom caps or in log cabins out on the Laplands, Sami lived but a few blocks away from the festival and I spent a few afternoons listening to music with the man (our favorite being the French pop album cut by Princess Stéphanie of Monacco). He told me that the two principal artists that inspire his label and its telltale sound are Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane. Fitting then that those two artists and their body of work continue to inspire me as well. Sami then gave me a slew of new Fonal releases, by himself, as well as Shogun Kunitoki. To top it all off, Fonal won an award that weekend from the Finnish music industry (for Best Album Art), which is sort of kin to Catsup Plate Records walking off with a Grammy.

Finland 2

I can unequivocally state that I've never been in a culture as intent on eating black food stuffs as the Finns. (Even in Cambodia, they stopped short at giant scorpions and tarantulas. Okay, that's a whole other level of fucked up, but I digress.) Perhaps it has to do with the dearth of sunlight, the sky an impenetrable cataract of clouds the duration of my stay, the time of day gauged only by gradations of grayness. Anyhow, I found myself ingesting quantities of black licorice that I never thought possible, especially salmiakki, this salty variant on the stuff: strong in taste as well as in fortitude: you could feel your gums developing muscles.

Another day, my hostess offered me a chocolate that when I bit into it, oozed out what she translated as "tar." Tar? In chocolate? It left an ashy streak on my skin and stank like Pine Sol, leading me to think that the confection was actually filled with pine tar. Meaning, what major leaguers rub all over their Louisville Sluggers is what counts as a delicacy here.

Nothing can possibly top the sight of mustamakkara (a/k/a black sausage) though:

Finland!

Packing up for a week in Finland today (read: thermal britches). A few days in the countryside and then off to attend a music festival in Tampere. Expect updates about the music scene (beyond Kemialliset Ystävät and Pan Sonic) to follow.