Club Kasettiasema — Program
Friday 11th July
Goathound
Gunswamp
The Micragirls
+ Kasettiasema Dj's
—
Saturday 12th July
Sooner Or Later
Janne Laurila
Anssi 8000 & Maria Stereo
Plain Ride
+ Kasettiasema Dj's
—
Sunday 13th July
JS666
Samae Koskinen ja hänen Taikabändinsä
Steel Mammoth
+ Kasettiasema Dj's
Program starts around 9pm, tickets 6€/night. Age limit 18 years.
Club Kasettiasema 2008
It bringeth on earthquake! It bringeth on thunder! Down in Kerubin Kuppila, also this year, the most eccentric party atmosphere of Ilosaarirock Festival will boil down to life-changingly dazzling hyper gems of super partying. Yessee sirree, all this and much more, since it is the epoch-makingly-table-turning FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of Club Kasettiasema! For an entire half a decade in a row now, the best audience meets the best artists in the sweaty summer night, forever's gonna start tonight and it's the total eclipse of the heart. The history of the universe hardly knows a party as great as Club Kasettiasema's five-year-jubilee gala. The only events that can come even near this one on the top ten list of power occasions must be the Deluge and the end of the world from the Bible, the Big Bang and the birth of life from the scientific scene, and the third birthday party of Eino-Petteri next door, and the time when ManU won the Champions League by scoring two goals in stoppage time. But on with the story! This year, Club Kasettiasema will keep its grand promises better than ever. This year, a remarkable portion of the program is really the best that the Finnish music scene has to offer, and the cold sweat and terrible embarrassment caused by mortifying failures will be expericed less often than ever before. Balancing on the thin cartridge wire between sad bungling and superior genius are the following hopefuls:
Friday July 11th
Goathound
A beatbox emitting a stationary ticking sound, a guitar playing a Mickey Mouse
two-sound riff, a synthesizer humming, howling, crackling and popping. Every now and then
somebody utters something unfathomable to the microphone. And every song repeats more or
less the same structure and usually lasts damn well longer than a normal pop song. That's
Goathound, that is, serving their seven-minute slouches of blues where a brooding trudge
meets an unhurried inertia, yawns and goes back to sleep. In spite of its occasional
rockabilly strain, it is entirely for the listeners to decide if this is a hypnotically
intensive trip to the primitive past of rock music, or just some mind-blowingly boring
banging going on in the background. Again, Club Kasettiasema gives the audience the
chance to decide whichever side they're on. I guess you have to be there early enough to
try it in case you might like it.
Gunswamp
Ear-splittingly noisy, yet oh ever so beautifully experimental red-neck ritual music is usually all too rare at rock festivals. Kasettiasema Club, once again, steps in to patch up this imperfection and welcomes the duo Gunswamp into the premises of Kerubin Kuppila, with all their string instruments, effect pedals and electric curiosity boxes. I guess it could be described as psychedelic Western noise, or as deconstructive heathen country, or as doom-ish Appalachian drone, or as some other special adjective with another special adjective-ish special genre. In any case, it's great music that can be recommended even to those festival goers who just like normal pop or rock. Scratches, whistles, crackles, booms, humming and just the occasional dojoings from the guitar are parts of the wall of sound that contains air, fluxes, swirls, tensions and eruptions more than a poor man's Jacuzzi.
The Micragirls
By now you should have somehow realised that The Micragirls, from Kuopio, Savo,
Finland of all places, are the cat's whiskers and the bee's knees when it comes to
all-female lo-fi trios in this time and this state of reality. Their new and improved
definition of tight ensemble playing states that tight can also be total helter-skelter
as long as it's perfectly synchronised. Tight helter-skelter, that's something only Savo
people can do.
The Micras' trash rock'n'roll combines rare musical talent with exploding mayhem-making, walking hand in hand towards the Kuopio Market Hall, where the girls grab a couple of muikku and a handful of kalakukko for a quick lunch, then jump into their Nissan and so goes the pedal to the metal. The tyres are screaming, the motor is roaring for help, the 8-track cassette player is blaring killer boogie on double speed. GO GO, GO GO GORILLA GO! And all the more astonishing is the fact that this three-piece cosmopolitan girl pack – cosmopolitan in the original sense of the word in that they've really been all over the world – is not merited only in music, but also in extremely stylish visual imagery. And in the fact that they're buddies to JON SPENCER! Goddamit if a gig by JON SPENCER's buddies is not good enough, then what is? JON SPENCER's buddies, at Kasettiasema!
Saturday 12th July
Sooner Or Later
Both Espe Haverinen and Antti Hämäläinen are old indie pop hands who have spent a fair share of their time gazing at the roadsides from the tour buses of, among others, such names as 22 Pistepirkko and Black Audio. Apart from that, they have written songs and lyrics and arrangements, played various instruments and lent their vocal cords to the service of the aforementioned bands and often been responsible for the pieces that many think are the most touching by the aforementioned bands. But the duo to be experienced at Club Kasettiasema is a horse of a very different colour. Sooner or Later travels is heading for destinations where the chaps' other projects haven't cared to stop during their travels. It's a minimalist exploration somewhere in the unmapped regions of blues, rock, country and pop, it's a Camel Boots kinda attitude and to boldly go where no man has gone before. All this and much more, only at Club Kasettiasema!
Janne Laurila
Every indie boy's and girl's favourite ice hockey enthusiast has been scoring amazing
goals in the first line of such combos as Office Building and Laurila, and it is not the
first time that this singer-songwriter comes to check the audience with his golden voice
at Club Kasettiasema, too. This summer in the Club Kasettiasema ice stadium Janne Laurila
races for gold and glory with his brand new Finnish solo material. Speed, strength, stickhandling
skills and the toughness required at physical contact are all there and the team will be on
offense with a ton of heart until the last man standing.
It might be a good idea to see and hear the Club Kasettiasema superstar now that it's still even remotely possible in an intimate club environment. Once Janne Laurila's Finnish-language hit album has come out, after that the man will only be seen on venues so big that you need to peer him through binoculars from somewhere in the back corners of some massive spectator halls. Tomorrow's stadium-size showmen to be experienced today, only at Club Kasettiasema!
Anssi 8000 & Maria Stereo
The fifth year jubilee of Club Kasettiasema would only be the fifth year with no jubilee if the fifth jubilee year wouldn't be jubileed for the fifth year in a row by the jubilous Anssi 8000, the man who has only played jubilee sets every year for a total of five consecutive jubilectic years! But as the title indicates, the man is not only a man anymore like in some earlier years, but now a rock-hard rock duo where Maria Stereo plays a part at least as important as Anssi himself. Only two people on stage, and yet there are drums, guitars, organ, bass and percussions to be heard, not to mention the great vocal harmonies.
Anssi 8000 & Maria Stereo's elemental and peculiarly rolling rock mixes up 1940's blues, 50's rockabilly, 60's garage rock, 70's hard rock, 80's punk, 90's alternative noise and 2000's postmodern popular culture references in a way that's only possible for this modern Renaissance couple from the forests of Sahalahti village. These walking, talking cultural melting pots do not confine themselves to stylistic pastiches of the aforementioned past decades, but bring us fresh, original, naturally melodic rock'n'roll which contains no artificial sweeteners or anything else redundant. Only the hard marrowbone of rhythm music remains, and the warm and unpretentious delivery.
Less is exponentially more, at Club Kasettiasema!
Plain Ride
After two astoundingly great and touching albums Plain Ride is quite
possibly THE BEST BAND IN THE WORLD at the moment, and as they play shows
really all too rarely, it makes the delight of seeing THE BEST BAND IN THE
WORLD in the sweaty back corner of Club Kasettiasema all the more exciting.
The chums have churned out classics before in the ranks of such names as
Sweetheart and Chainsmoker, but in Plain Ride they are capable of combining
hypnotic rocking to dizzying human tenderness in a manner never heard
before. The songs contain echoes all the way from Krautrock to folk to
country music to punk rock, but really, when it comes to the extraordinary
heartfeltness of the material, the genre issues dwindle to mere trifles.
This is music that you both want to dance to and to listen to intensively at
the same time. You'll find your feet twisting, your lip twitching, your eyes
glistening from tears of joy and emotion: it's THE BEST BAND IN THE WORLD,
at Club Kasettiasema.
www.plainride.com
myspace.com/plainride
Sunday 13th July
JS666
Do you, in these days of aural oversupply, ever feel that you just can't
listen to everything that you would like to? That there are too many fine
evergreens and alluring new hits jumping too far and spreading too wide and
disappearing from one's hold? That it's impossible to get the slice that
you'd like to have of the irrationally overgrown global music cake? Have no
fear, the answer to this demanding question is here, and it goes by the name
JS666. By supercharging old hits and new pieces one after, on top and in
between the other with a horrible pressure, JS666 brings forth a musical
strobo light that by every flash gives a new aural angle to something that
you're quite sure you've heard somewhere before. Bouncing in the inner space
between Velcro trainer schlagers, horsepower hormonal techno and amputatee
ballet, this rhythmical rapid-fire breaks all conventional structures and
principles, and results in a tightly-squeezed tonal treatment that contains
everything that you've ever really wanted to hear. Nutritious ear nosh,
delightful disdain for every rule, at Club Kasettiasema!
Samae Koskinen ja hänen Taikabändinsä
Samae Koskinen (also known from Sister Flo, Röyhkä & Mattila, and his
solo projects) is a young musician and songwriter noted for a reason. His
compositions and lyrics seem to spring from an entirely different pop
tradition as the warblings of most other Finnish singer-songwriters. The
cunningly catchy tunes are equipped with loads of hit potential and still
remain excitingly peculiar. And yet some of mr. Koskinen's songs have been
heard on the radio and, gosh-darn and cor blimey, even on the telly! As is
fitting, also Samae Koskinen's new band "Taikabändi" is something other than
a bunch of your usual mediocre heavy-schlager-banging Finnish rockers. With
a song arsenal ranging from light psychedelic pop to The Who-like noise,
Samae Koskinen ja hänen taikabändinsä have promised to play at Club
Kasettiasema a very special psychedelic party set exclusively tailored for
this night, this audience, this intimate event alone! Exclusive delights as
seen on TV, only at Club Kasettiasema!
www.samaekoskinen.com
myspace.com/samaekoskinen
Steel Mammoth
A lonely engine roars on the post-nuclear war radioactive wasteland. A
barbaric juggernaut rides on his grand war machine over the enemy's mass
grave. An occultist spell by the midnight witches wakes a thunder dragon
from his million-year sleep in the depths of a negative atom mountain. Soon
the eyes of a celestial shadow army start shining laser beams, burning once
more the already devastated land. The cursed spawn of wrath rises from the
ashes. And Steel Mammoth's metallic nuclear desert rock hobbles forward like
blood-thirsty Berserker corps. The riffs are flowing out, the stud belt is
glistening in the moonlight, the fists are banging the polluted air.
Steel Mammoth's instant-classic first album Atomic Mountain has astonished both rock critics and music fans alike in every corner of this doomed planet. Even the audience of Club Kasettiasema, usually so blasé, so hard to surprise, meets with an unexpected challenge when the torch carriers of the latest-wave Finnish heavy metal start spitting out their curses. And when their axes start swinging, it's the chuckling jokers and the ironic metal warriors who get sliced up first. The survivors can enjoy a surreal musical feast which lays on the line, to name just a few, the philosopher's stone, the Holy Grail and the master key to the golden kingdom of eternal rock'n'roll.
But of course all the noise and clamour within the walls of Kerubin Kuppila doesn't come from bands alone. There are plenty of festival area events and sideshows, too! The world-class electro-acoustic troubadours and Kasettiasema All Stars are here at your service for the entire weekend, not to mention the wealth of DJs in charge of the untoward and wayward record choices: Karate, Kaveri, Sid Barrett, Digitaalinaiset, Samaentha Foxinen, Eevis, Kuka Pieras, Reilu, Laihialaisten Partakone, Coco El Macd, Niuho, Edward II, Hapan Röyhtäys, Ruskein Länkkäri, Turvaton Karkulaistyttö and many others that we can't remember just now. So dance, drink and be merry, for tomorrow it's another festival day! Party all night long, or at least until the last orders!
Niskakatu 16, Joensuu
tel. +358 13 129 377
www.kerubi.fi