Beat a Go Go

Ismo with the electric kantele, Kaustinen Festival

There's no airconditioning in the headquarters of the Kaustinen folk festival, so we go outside. We finally find a patch of shade at the edge of a parking lot, next to a bus. Alanko arranges his wiry frame on the grass and takes off his sunglasses. His pale, penetrating eyes tilt up at the corners - foxlike, humorous.

People passing by recognize him - he's been a rock god in Finland for twenty years. But apart from a few curious glances, they make no big fuss about a celebrity in their midst. Calm and low-key is the style here. Alanko himself is an example of this. He has an unassuming manner - no "star attitude" visible.

He's here at the Kaustinen festival to help promote the electric kantele, a new instrument developed by kantele maker Hannu Koistinen in an effort to do for the Finnish national instrument what was once done for the guitar. In last night's concert, Alanko and his band, Ismo Alanko Säätiö [Ismo Alanko Foundation] teamed up with kantelists Timo Väänänen and Hannu Saha (the director of the Kaustinen Folk Music Centre) to showcase the versatility of this new instrument. In the big finale, all the musicians onstage strummed electric kanteles that looked a little like aluminum skateboards.

Alanko says, "I happened to hear Timo playing the electric kantele, and then I started to be interested in it - it sounded so good when I heard him play. And I thought that maybe I could use it on my album." He later changed his mind and went for conventional strings instead, but he still admires the sound of the instrument.

Samples of different models are on display at a demonstration booth. I tell him that after the concert, I saw several small boys over at the booth pretending to play the kanteles like rock guitars. Can "air kantele" be far behind? Alanko grins in satisfaction - evidently his mission was a success.

This isn't the first time that Alanko has played at this folk festival. A few years ago he and his Säätiö made an appearance and performed a tune by the late fiddler Konsta Jylhä, a Finnish favorite and a local hero in Kaustinen. Alanko doesn't see any conflict between folk and rock. He says, "I don't know what folk music is. People say it's music that people used to play fifty or a hundred years ago. But I don't understand that. I think I've written folk music for twenty years - all the time that I've played in rock bands! From my point of view, it's folk music."

Ismo at Provinissirock, 1995 (photo by Timo Koski)

Were his parents musicians? "My father was kind of an amateur singer, but he decided that he couldn't earn his living with singing," Alanko laughs. "So he had to do something else and he became a businessman. My mother was - when you speak poets?" He moves his fingers through the air, trying to find the English word. Perhaps there isn't one. She organized recitations? "Something like that. So I heard poets from a young age, all the time. And all this traditional folk stuff."

Without a doubt, this had an effect on the development of his charismatic vocal style. His deep voice is something unique, with a mesmerizing resonance. He can do all the rock 'n' roll screaming, but he has a range far beyond that. In a guest vocal on Värttinä's album Ilmatar, in the song "Äijö", he casts a shamanic curse of such snarling power that it chills the blood. At other times, his voice can be light, soothing and surprisingly delicate. But even in his prettier tunes, it carries an ominous quality, a hint of despair - the feeling of a drunken reveler admiring the beauty of the sunrise and knowing that very soon his hangover will kick in.

His music is as original as his voice. In spite of his popular success, he's never allowed himself to get stuck in a rut. Over his long career he's been a shapeshifter - throwing himself into a project that blazes brightly for a while, experimenting with different influences, then moving on to something else that's new and fresh.

He shot to stardom at age 19 with the band Hassisen Kone [Hassinen's Machine], named after a shop in Joensuu. They played energetic, new-wave-influenced rock driven by Alanko's vocals and songwriting. At the height of their fame, the band split up. Alanko put together a new group, Sielun Veljet [Soul Brothers]. "The best rock and roll band in the world," he says firmly, eyes shining, mouth turned up. It's framed as a joke, but I think he means it.

They started as stripped-down rock, with a "big, violent and strong sound", as Alanko describes it. Throughout their career, they evolved through various styles, culminating in an English-language album of acoustic psychedelia. Along the way, they amassed a lot of hits and became well-known for their bizarre sense of humor. One song from their first album is a loud rock 'n' roll ode to Emil Zatopek that consists mostly of the Czech runner's name chanted over and over. Why Emil Zatopek? I ask. "Because of the attitude," Alanko says. "You know, his style was really ugly. But he was the strongest. It was the attitude."

The band had its own special ugly/strong attitude - they did things their own way, even when it pissed people off. "Sometimes, in small clubs, we didn't bring the amplifiers in at all - totally acoustic, and only candles. And when we released our most popular album, l'Amourha, we had a record release gig at Tavastia. It was sold out - everyone had come to hear our songs from the album. Instead we did a pantomime of 'Little Red Riding Hood' and didn't play any songs."

How did the audience react to this? Alanko chuckles, remembering. "They hated it. They wanted their money back!"

Sielun Veljet (photo by Stefan Bremer)

Sielun Veljet

In other live performances, they took on new personas and played music that their fans didn't expect. "We did different incarnations of the band," Alanko says. "Leputation of the Slaves was glam rock, Pimpline and the Defenites was r&b." In one of their more curious transformations, they took a step back from rock into the pop of an earlier day: Alanko posed as "Kullervo Kivi", a Finnish lounge singer, with the other soul-brothers as his jazzy backup band. One of these concerts was recorded and eventually released in a double-CD collection of Sielun Veljet odds and ends, Musta Laatikko [black box], which also includes a beautiful flamenco version of the Finnish folk tune, "Hintrikki Peltoniemi's Funeral March". The Kullervo Kivi set is notable for Jukka Orma's fine guitar work and Alanko's singing. He puts his sultry spin on tangos, schlagers and Finnish versions of American classics like "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", "Ghost Riders in The Sky" and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

Kullervo Kivi (photo by Kuuti)

It's a pleasure to listen to, and makes one wish that Alanko would have some further adventures with old-fashioned jazz vocals. But it's so different from the band's other work that I have to ask him - what possessed them to do such a weird thing? "This was the music I had heard on the radio when I was a child." he says. In case this isn't a sufficient explanation, he smiles impishly and says, "It's boring to do the same stuff all the time!"

Sielun Veljet's last studio album - and perhaps their most unusual recording - got its start in India, where Alanko had traveled for two months. He wrote several songs there, inspired by Indian classical music and film music. "It was a really impressive place, the most impressive place I've ever been," he says. "Before I went on the trip we had decided we would make another rock album, but when I came back, Jukka had started to learn flamenco. He was playing it all the time." With these new influences, the band made an all-acoustic album, with lyrics in English: Softwood Music (Under Slow Pillars).

The band had done two other English-language recordings before, but they were translations of songs originally written in Finnish. This was the first that was naturally born in English. Alanko says, "At the time I had an English girlfriend and I spent most of my time in London. It was natural for me to think and write in English."

The album didn't take off the way they thought it would. "It was supposed to be our big invasion of the world - we thought that everybody would buy it, all around the world. But it was totally different from what we had been doing before, so our record company didn't like it and didn't want to promote it. It was before its time, really - it came a couple of years before the return of psychedelia."

After Sielun Veljet, Alanko moved on to a tremendously successful solo career. In 2000 he developed a stage show, Labra [lab], with his friend, designer and director Stefan Lindfors. Alanko composed the music and performed it with his band, Ismo Alanko Säätiö. Its run in Helsinki was sold out. A combination of a rock concert and musical theatre, the show took place inside a giant steel egg, on a stage that was only three meters in diameter. "It was so intimate, it was such a small room, the audience was so near all the time. It was really special. I liked that. At first I thought it was a bit claustrophobic, but then I started to enjoy it. You can really communicate directly with people."

Ismo in the greenhouse (photo by Harri Hinkka)

The music for the show was released on CD as Sisäinen Solarium [indoor solarium/greenhouse], an artfully produced album that bridged the gap between rock/pop and "world music". It's an impressive achievement and it's surprising that it wasn't noticed by the rest of the world. It surprised Alanko too. "With Sisäinen Solarium, I was expecting that it would have some chance to go out of Finland," he says. "But in Finland, nobody believes in it. Nobody wants to do anything for it - promote it - because it's sung in Finnish. Everybody says, oh, you have no chance, because it's not folk music. If it was folk music, OK, there would be only a small audience, but there would be a certain framework - because there is always an audience for folk music, like Värttinä or whatever. But, they say, nobody wants to listen to rock music sung in Finnish. There's nobody who wants to sell it. And I can't do it myself. I'm too busy with making music, and taking care of my family, and living. I don't have time to try to sell myself."

Will he do more English-language music in the future, as in his Sielun Veljet days? He waves this off. "I'm not interested in singing in English - I have nothing to say in English. I don't want to do it just for commercial reasons. If the time will come that I have something to say, then I will do it."

His main focus now is songwriting. "With Säätiö the band, we did a lot of jamming, trying to find atmospheres and things like that. But now I just try to write the best songs that I can. I take a piano, or a guitar, and let the music flow. I just sit down and play, and improvise. And then I improvise words. When I get something I like, after that I sharpen it."

Even though I can't understand any of his lyrics, the sound of them is beautiful and moving - they're music in themselves. He's pleased to hear this. "That's what I aim at. I want to write lyrics that are music - that you don't need to understand the words. And that's a big challenge, because so many people think that the Finnish language is not singable, with all these consonants and things like that. But I don't think this way. I think it's a really nice, beautiful, musical language. But it's a big challenge to write language that is music at the same time." He adds dryly, "But there are so many things in the lyrics, that if you knew what they meant, it would be so much more."

Alanko is a self-described "book freak" and his lyrics are often highly literate. So I'm told by Finns, anyway. But these lyrics are very hard to translate. After the concert I talked with a few Finns who were remarking on how deep and poetic Alanko's lyrics were. When I asked them what the words meant in English, they fell silent. Finally they shook their heads and said, "It's difficult to explain - you have to know Finnish."

He agrees. "Language is always related to the culture, so there are a lot of things you can't translate. American culture is so familiar to everybody that everybody knows what people mean when they sing something. But there are so many things in the Finnish language which are related to all ways and means of Finnish culture that it's kind of impossible to translate. Not big things - everything is basically understandable - but small. All the time, in the way I use Finnish language, there are always some hints of things, like old sayings - allusions."

A good example of this is his famous hit "Kun Suomi Putos Puusta" [When Finland fell out of the tree], from his first solo album in 1990. Because of its elegiac tone and its minimal production - Alanko used background sounds recorded in the outdoors, including dogs barking, birds singing, the drone of a distant chainsaw, and the thud of a shovel plunging into gravel - it would seem to be an unlikely pop success, but it touched something in the Finnish soul.

When Finland Fell out of the Tree
When Finland fell out of the tree one beautiful summer Sunday
the puzzled child of mortals swapped the straw for the parquet
from sweaty cheekbones snot ran down so wildly everywhere
And Koskenkorva took the coattail folk up to nirvana
The Karelian squint-eye stared into his computer screen
The Litmanen-head bought a Beaujolais to drown his misery
the Savolainen junior to the 'acid house' he went
downed his moonshine to the dregs and more of it he sent
When Finland fell out of the tree it all went up in smoke
no one saw the pig itself or even saw the poke
when Finland fell out of the tree the milk was milkier (1)
the ice-hole fish was freezer-fresh, nights were blackier (1),
When Finland fell out of the tree it all shot up in smoke
The mire, the hoe - and Jussi(2),
The plastic bag and Luther Martti
Germany and Sweden and Russia heaved a sigh as if out of one mouth
when Finland fell out of the tree
When Finland fell out of the tree, the time iron it showed seven
At eight a broken leg in the living-standard games
One foot in the cowhouse, the other on the tennis court
One hand on an udder, the other on a remote control
The forest-dwelling tongue twister whips up more than his whole mouth can say
In the dark of smoke sauna the datanomist finds his joy
Veijo son of Häme flips a Chinese pizza over
Swearing by this Hansa dish Columbus binds up fronds for sauna

(1) "milkier" and "blackier" were in English in the original.
(2) Väinö Linna's novel Here Under the Northern Star opens with: "In the beginning was the mire, the hoe - and Jussi..."

((Translated by Michael Garner)

Alanko explains, "Finland has changed really quickly from an agricultural country to the technology-based society that it is now. When she was young, my mother was skiing to the school in the morning through the dark forest - living without electricity - and now she has DVDs and CDs and everything. In her lifetime, everything has changed. We came out of the trees, but almost too fast - we fell."

In terms of mood, his newest CD, Hallanvaara [frost warning] harks back to this album. Most of the songs are filled with a sense of mournful quietude. There is a classical influence - there are a lot of strings and horns, piano and acoustic guitar. The elegant production sets off Alanko's voice handsomely. "I call it sort of Nino Rota Pop," he says with a smile. "I had this kind of a movie feeling. I found that I wanted to write that kind of song that can very easily make pictures in your mind. And I wanted to write lyrics that fit perfectly to the mood of the music. I wrote the music and then I let the subconscious work. These lyrics would come out, and I would think, oh, fucking hell, why am I writing this, is there something wrong? Where did THIS come from?"

Tulessamakaaja - In-the-fire-lier (1)

Ilmasillat roikkuivat alhaalla
Air bridges (2) were hanging down low

Niitä pitkin juoksi lapsia
Along them ran children

Yksinäisiin paikkoihin, yksinäisiin paikkoihin
To solitary places, to solitary places

Pakoon pahanilmanlintuja
Escaping from the birds of ill omen

Niitä tuli joka puolelta
They came from every side

Ne veivät toiset pois
They took the others away

Ei niitä runous kiinnostanut
They were not interested in poetry

Ne veivät toiset pois
They took the others away

Mä jäin tuleen makaamaan
I stayed lying down in the fire

Mä jäin tuleen makaamaan
I stayed lying down in the fire

(1) There is a saying in Finnish: "Jäädä tuleen makaamaan" - to stay lying down in a fire (as in a battle). And "Ei saa jäädä tuleen makaamaan" - you must not stay lying down in a fire or difficult situation (do something instead, fight). Consequently, "Tulessamakaaja" means in-the-fire-lier (somebody who is lying down in the fire).

(2) Literally ilma = air, silta = bridge. But ilmasilta = airlift (e.g. in Berlin during the Cold War).

(Translated by Markus R.)

The orchestral sound of Hallanvaara is a departure for Alanko. "I wrote six or seven songs, then I talked with my producer and we realized we needed a big orchestra to play them, not a rock band. In the two albums before, the sound of the band dominated the music."

But when touring with the Säätiö, his rock outfit, Alanko gives those songs another personality. "We made new arrangements - we play them with three guitars. It sounds really different." He grins. "It's big fun to surprise the audience."

After the experience of doing the album with all those strings, do these heavy guitars bring him back to his roots? "Kind of." He laughs gleefully. "I want to play a Fender Telecaster LOUD! With a big Marshall stack behind my back!"

Whatever musical styles he'll explore in the future, inside Ismo Alanko there beats the heart of a rocker.

Ismo at Hassisen Kone reunion, Eastpop 2000 (photo: Kari Lahtinen)

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Videos of Hassisen Kone reunion concert: "Levottomat Jalat" and "Rappiolla" (RealPlayer required)

official website: http://www.ismoalanko.com

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Many thanks to Markus R., Henry Majander, Susanna Pellinen, and Michael K. for their help with this article. - Heather-Rose Ryan

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Buy Ismo Alanko CDs through Popangel in Helsinki:http://www.popangel.fi/

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