Dear friends, the Suomi Weird Spring is here! Starting this Saturday in the Prague-based club Nová Chmelnice with a show of the experimental-black metal visionaries ORANSSI PAZUZU, supported by DESIRE FOR SORROW a MALLEPHYR!
To get the proper vibe going, we made for you an unofficially official, in either case totally weird, trailer.
In addition, we also wrote a short, somewhat even touching the domains of philosophy and cultural interpretation, treatise about this kind of music, entitled "Tampere oddities":
Tampere has a very rich music scene, at least judging by the number of gigs and festivals that take place in this second largest Finnish city. It also has a museum of V. I. Lenin, located in the Worker’s Hall, where in 1906 Lenin met Stalin for the first time, and where in a sense the Soviet revolution was born. Perhaps thanks to such favorable conditions for musicians and revolutionaries of all kinds, it is no wonder that the nexus of the Finnish alternative hard music was formed precisely there, specifically in one basement in the Nekala district called the “Wastement”.
There has its lair, shall we say, the “brotherhood of low frequency riffs”, that is, a quintet of interconnected bands ORANSSI PAZUZU, DARK BUDDHA RISING, MR. PETER HAYDEN, ATOMIKYLÄ and ABYSSION, which are united by their shared passion for, simply put, weird sounding music that defies clear genre classification.
Or the root of all this is LSD, which, as the member of DBR said in one interview, must be present in ample doses pretty much everywhere in Finland, if the last gives birth to such acoustic strangeness.
Whatever the reason, truth remains that the music of the aforementioned bands falls into highly unorthodox subgenres, such as experimental, psychedelic, drone, groove, ambient, space rock etc., which are more or less combined by the individual acts, giving each its unique signature sound. For instance, in case of ORANSSI PAZUZU we can thus speak of a synthesis of black metal practices with pure music experiments; in case of DARK BUDDHA RISING of musical mantras rather than songs in the usual sense that combine darkwave, repetitive drone, psychedelics and avant-garde, jazz even, elements; and in case of MR. PETER HAYDEN, we can perhaps say only that this purely instrumental ambient/sludge/drone/space rock forms a soundtrack from the depths of cosmos.
After all, when listening to these bands, a thought emerges if perhaps their music is the confirmation of what is in Kantian aesthetics called the “genius”, which can be defined as a condition, wherein the artist becomes an unknowing instrument through which beauty in its higher, transcendental form enters our mundane world.
In addition, the matter can be also seen from the perspective of the French postmodern philosophy (especially Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari come to mind), whereby we can posit that the weirdness of this music lies in its pure “deterritorialization”, that is, in absence of any anchoring and stabilizing structures (in music e.g. the refrain), which enables the manifestation of a hint of the “primordial creative chaos” (essentially a repetitive “engine” whose chance combinations of the nuclei of content and expression are the basis of all being) that rips the listener out of his familiar inhabited territories, transposing him onto a “line of flight”, that is, to a space of new intensities and modalities.
If we follow such interpretation, it is no wonder that this music is not for everyone, for it is by its own condition revolutionary, deconstructive, and not everyone is willing or able to leave his familiar territories, which on one had is in a way as it should be, for man needs certain stabilized structures in order to be and Deleuze himself warns that the deterritorialization process should be undertaken very carefully, however on the other hand overt territorialization entails a risk of stagnation, fossilization even, whereby we can reach the conclusion that such type of music is in a sense needed, if not outright necessary, for it balances the traditionally structured art and creates an alternative vista wherein said “lines of flight” can be realized.
Whatever your opinion on this music may be, it cannot be denied its specific charm and gravitas, whereby it will find its fans. In fact, this May, the Dutch city of Tilburg shall host another installment of the iconic Roadburn festival, that is, the gathering of all music weirdos (in the positive sense of course), where among others all five Wastement bands shall appear. And since for this occasion, three of them, that being ORANSSI PAZUZU, DARK BUDDHA RISING and MR. PETER HAYDEN are setting out for their European tours, we used the opportunity and decided to orchestrate their stops in Prague (March 12, April 1, April 28) thus creating the “Suomi Weird Spring”.
You are cordially invited!
P.S.:in case you are missing tickets, the presale is still up and running on MetalGate e-shop, as well as in the Ticketstream network.