Club Telex (Tampere, Finland)
Be forewarned, though: it's not purely about electro but also some other things that all bore the indistinct name "underground".
The first Club Telex, with Nu Science and Op:l Bastards performing, took place on the 27th of March, 1999, at Yo-Talo, Tampere’s traditional Student Union House. I remember our concept of having electronic live acts was somehow inspired by a club named Osasto in Helsinki. What we added there was that we also showed short films early in the evening, making it a sort of – for a lack of better expression – multimedia event.
At this point Nu Science were still the original duo of Mikko Ojanen and Henri Tani. They had dragged with them to the stage a respectable arsenal of analogue electronics. Their sound was still very lo-fi/ambient, taking its inspiration from the 1980s Commodore 64 aesthetics, and not much mercy was given to the dance-hungry ravers and local homeboys. The drum machines went crackle, crackle and crackle, the synths said whoosh and bleerb. There were some tracks, though, venturing to the "melodic" domain of Kraftwerk and 70s/80s synthpop, like 'Space Bar' and 'Qwerty'. A series of slides was projected to the screen behind the band, where you could see some neat computer graphics and the title of each track playing. There was a short pause in between every song, which must have been caused by the unstability of their analogue instruments, obviously needing constant re-tuning and looking like they were going to break at any given moment. Which of course just increased the unpredictability and that special underground-ish atmosphere of the whole event.
The Op:l Bastards' (Timo Kaukolampi, Mikko Viljakainen a.k.a. Vilunki 3000 and Tuomo Puranen) set was a combination of electro, analogue synth noodlings, funk, Krautrock and postrock. Vilunki also played electric bass, Kaukolampi made some peculiar space vocals out of his vocoder and Puranen looked like the long-lost member of 22-Pistepirkko at his keyboards. Op:l Bastards played some songs from their 1998 EP, such as 'Spraybeat' and the biggest underground dance track in Finland in '98, 'Funking', as a seven-minute version. Also some new tracks like 'Sagittarius' and 'Jet Black Man' were heard.
“Electronic Avantgarde Excursions” was the tagline of Club Telex, even though in the end there was less experimental music as the average member of local audience – usually consisting of students, indie hipsters and perhaps an odd raver – was craving for something to dance to rather than to listen some weirdness while scratching one’s chin and nodding one’s head knowingly.
“Perkeleenmoinen groove” (loosely translates as “hell of a groove”) was another expression that was favoured in our plugs to specifically promote the event.
As was also the Student Union of Tampere University, who would assist us in booking the nights at Yo-Talo, with Timo Isomäki then working as the club programme manager for the venue and being also the main person to talk to about confirming any dates for Club Telex. Saturdays were usually reserved for Yo-Talo's popular weekend discos, therefore the best option for us would be getting ourselves a Friday night. (Any other nights were just a no go, in a town this size.)
The name “Telex” was inspired by the Belgian synthpop act of the same name, having also a nice retrofuturistic ring to it in an era when e-mails and the Internet were already replacing the old telex and telefax machines as a primary means of rapid global communication.
Acidroot Soundsystem, Ektroverde, Ever Had, Helsinki Bass Machine, Imatran Voima, Jimi Tenor, Kemialliset Ystävät, Kukka, Anton Nikkilä, M.A. Numminen, Mono Junk, Mr Velcro Fastener, Nemesis, Nu Science, Op:l Bastards, O Samuli A, Ovuca, Pan sonic, Pink Twins, Planet Lander, Spektor vs. Nukleon, Tero, Unidentified Sound Objects, Ural 13 Diktators, Virtalähde, and Ylikulju.
And the international artists who performed at Club Telex:
Alexei Borisov (RU), Chicks on Speed (AU/DE/US), Fennesz (AT) (who played as a duo with the late Mika Vainio), Hecker (AT), I-f (DJ set/NL), Jeans Team (DE), Peaches (US), Nicole Willis (US), Pluxus (SE), and Skot (AT).
Some of these artists we had in collaboration with Avanto Festival and Helsinki Turbo, who arranged for them a gig also in Helsinki (for some of these people, there might have been some live action in Turku, too). There were also some events in collaboration with Kaukana Väijjyy (sic) Ystäviä and Mindtrek festivals. Fennesz, Hecker and Skot appeared courtesy of Austria’s Mego label.
Wheeler synopsis:
San Francisco detective Harry Wheeler (played by Lonny Eyes a.k.a. I-f) arrives in The Hague in search of Guy Tavares (Guy Tavares), who has murdered Wheeler’s partner Chico (Melvin White) in San Francisco, when he was bringing ransom money for his kidnapped wife to Tavares. In The Hague, he is assisted by the detective Danny Blanco (played by Legowelt’s Danny Wolfers, who is also the film’s author), who recently graduated from the police academy. They find yet another victim of Tavares in the city’s gay park, and from the corpse a cigarette lighter, with the address of a club. At the club they find out that Tavares is dealing drugs in the Hague Cathedral. When Wheeler and Blanco arrive at the Cathedral, the statue of Jesus speaks to Wheeler, who says he doesn’t believe in Jesus because he’s an atheist. Jesus tells Wheeler that when He arrived in heaven in His time it was empty and that there was no God, and that Wheeler is now a god. Wheeler is shocked by this revelation. In the ensuing chase, Tavares murders Wheeler, but Blanco shoots Tavares, stating in his closing speech, that Wheeler, the last defender of justice, did not belong to this world. Shot on digital video, length approx. 20 min., music: e.g. Dopplereffekt, I-f, Electronome, Elecktroids. Directed by Danny Wolfers.
The 1990s "sewer electro" sound of Den Haag and the West Coast of the Netherlands, represented by such labels as Bunker Records, Viewlexx et al., was a strong influence, and it was a great honour for us to have I-f at Club Telex. It was also through people like Ferenc that the 1980s Italodisco would find its renaissance in the electro scene of the day and onwards.
Guest DJs and films at Club Telex
As guest DJs for Club Telex nights we had, among all, such people as DCom, 6M4 (a.k.a. Gamma), Indigo, Kauko Lampi, Kuuro Kädetön Paisti, Marko Laine, Mike Not, Randy B., and Stimulus Progression.
As for the films shown during our nights, we had at least Futuro and Thank You for the Music by Mika Taanila, then the world premiere of Routemaster by Ilppo Pohjola. The director himself would have liked to show it with a 35 mm film projector, but dragging such heavy and expensive equipment to the club premises of Yo-Talo, which originally served as a bank in the early 20th century, would have been sheer impossibility, so we had to compromise, and another video projection it was to be. Also the legendary Eino Ruutsalo’s experimental 1960s shorts and episodes of such classic Finnish children’s animation series, from the 1960s and 70s, as Kössi Kenguru and Käytöskukka were often seen.
Jyrki visits Club Telex
Jyrki, at that time perhaps the most watched pop music TV show in Finland, visited the Commodore 64 theme night of Club Telex in January 2001. Interviewed here are Mikko “mini” Niemelä (known for Polytron, later also as the promoter for Ruisrock festival), Tero (Mäyränen, who released 8-bit type of electro for Rikos Records) and Nu Science, with Mikko Ojanen (who later wrote his doctorate thesis on Erkki Kurenniemi) and Henri Tani talking at Yo-Talo’s legendary backroom while the third member, Aku Raski (later known for Huoratron), smiles contentedly.
Music in Club Telex
As said, "Electronic Avantgarde Excursions" was the official mission statement of Club Telex. However, in practice it wouldn't be too easy to follow. Basically, we were in the same business of dance music as the commercial clubs and raves with their superstar DJs, to provide some entertainment for your social night out, but we also wanted to do something experimental, even as some sort of artistic statement.
Is the task of a DJ to educate people about music and its history, or is a disc jockey an entertainer and human jukebox who should just “give people what they want”? And the same questions specifically about organising a club night.
This is what I often pondered myself when I was involved with Club Telex and also in general when trying to work as a DJ. Those days I saw it – in retrospect, rather naively and probably with a too idealistic and ambitious view – even as my personal, erm, mission to bring to our hometown some new and different kind of music, perhaps also some sort of interesting, diverse music culture that could be groundbreaking for our tiny provincial scene.
One telling example of the ultimate difficulty of this task was the second Club Telex night, 26 May 1999, when we had Virtalähde, a.k.a. Jaakko Viitalähde, doing a live noise set. Here’s what I wrote just after the event about the proceedings during that night:
Virtalähde of Tampere played a one-man set with his mighty modular synth and considerable gear arsenal; a Russian propaganda film from the early 80's was projected on the screen above him, and Mr. Virtalähde managed to create a respectable amount of noise well comparable to the Japanese noisemeisters à la Merzbow & Masonna. Like the Futurists, who were thrown with rotten vegetables during their performances in the early decades of the 20th century, this provoked too some scared and angry reactions from the bemused pop audience, who escaped to the bar, or just as with this unfortunate fellow in Depeche Mode t-shirt, who shouted: ‘Go to hell with your machines! People become deaf here!’ and furiously ran out of the building. Fucking hilarious, to be honest. Unfortunately, Virtalähde's ear-shattering set was cut abruptly because of some failed cable, but most people probably thought that was part of the show, so that was quite stylish ending, in fact. Ultimate wind-up, and Virtalähde deserves our undivided respect for that.
Jaakko Viitalähde has done well during the last years with his own mastering company. As far as I know, he doesn’t do noise recordings or perform live any more.
The second live act during that same night was Ektroverde, Mika Rintala’s analogue project with custom-made electronic instruments. Ektroverde was originally one of the offshoots of Pori’s Circle family who have shown their resilience for over thirty years now. Rintala, playing keyboard, looked in his hat like a lost fisherman from outer space, joined on bass by Jussi Lehtisalo and on guitar by Teemu Elo, both then of Circle, and also the guy from Kiila who played a saw. Totally we saw a group of eight people jamming on stage, performing endless, disorientating Krautrock riffs and galactic frequencies. The film director Mika Taanila was also there, projecting to the screen film test cards, hand-painted slices of celluloid, some stuff that looked like cut-ups from the 60's fashion commercials and so on. Unfortunately this experiment was jarred by some technical problems too, but what we saw worked fine in this context.
Kaukana Väijjyy (sic) Ystäviä festival was organised 2-3 March 2000 by Telex together with another local club, Mental Alaska. They arranged their events at Tampere's Telakka, a former small warehouse turned into a theatre space and club-restaurant. The Mental Alaska club nights were run by the core group of Arttu Partinen, Roope Eronen, Tomas Regan and friends. Jan Anderzén of Kemialliset Ystävät also actively participated in the scene. You could hear at Mental Alaska's intimate listening nights free jazz, improvisation, psychedelia, folk, acoustic, electroacoustic, experimental, Kraut or spacerock, and so on. A small movement of artists and bands started to form around the same musical spirit. The Wire magazine and other international cognoscenti later on started to call that scene the "New Weird of Finland" or "forest folk". So, it was pretty much far removed from what Club Telex represented musically... or was it?
Was Club Telex underground? It's hard to say. Ever since the late 1960s, music scene has been splintering into smaller genres and their subgenres. There is not one underground representing certain styles of music and/or culture but several of them, each with their own differing musical and social agendas.
In Finland, the late 60s underground was represented by M.A. Numminen and his various projects, Suomen Talvisota 1939-1940 probably being the best known. During the same era, The Sperm, both an improvisational & experimental musical ensemble and performance group of Pekka Airaksinen, Mattijuhani Koponen et al. was also at the forefront of Finnish underground movement.
'Kaukana väijyy ystäviä' ("Far away lurk some friends") was a 1968 experimental piece by M.A. Numminen and Sähkökvartetti (The Electric Quartet), an electronic ensemble instrument devised by Erkki Kurenniemi. Numminen, who could well be called the Godfather of Finnish Underground, gave his official blessing for us to have the title as the name of our festival. Before the permission to use the title was received from M.A. Numminen, the early ads for the event had spelled the word "väijyy" ("lurk") with two "j"'s, to avoid any possible problems legally or copyright-wise. Numminen also performed himself later that same year at Club Telex. At the time of writing this, M.A. Numminen, born in 1940, has retired from music, solely concentrating on his writings now.
The Tampere Film Festival held on the 9th of March 2001 invited Chicks on Speed from Berlin to perform at Club Telex that was held in conjunction with the fest. They also did another Finnish gig at the Helsinki Turbo in Tavastia.
In their original line-up Chicks on Speed were an electronic girl trio consisting of Alex Murray-Leslie (originally from Australia), Melissa Logan (USA) and Kiki Moorse (Germany), who all resided in Berlin then. The Chicks had met at Munich's Art Academy and their art school approach could be called "multimedia" or even "plunderphonics". They didn't only make music but also graphics for their own releases, for art galleries, their own stage clothes and had many performances worldwide.
In spirit they were probably closest to the DIY punk/new wave ideals of the 1970/80s, though their brand of music combined electro, techno, house, experimental and pop. Their first single was a cover of The Normal's 'Warm Leatherette'. Furthermore, they had covered songs from Freiwillige Selbstkontrol (FSK), Malaria!, Delta 5 and The B52's. They had such original tracks as 'Glamour Girl', 'Turn of the Century", 'For All the Boys in the World", 'Sell-Out' and 'We Don't Play Guitars".
The Chicks said they immensely enjoyed their visit to the sunny, yet wintery, Tampere, checking out some films at the festival, visiting the local Lenin Museum and going to the sauna and swimming in an icy lake. After hitting the sauna, the Chicks did the obligatory Finnish tradition of rolling naked in the snow after a steam session and drinking much beer in the sauna.
As the time reached one o'clock on Friday night, the crowd at Yo-talo was already bursting with excitement. A lengthy Chicks on Speed video, which had been shown just before their performance, really confused and annoyed some people. It was basically only long cinéma vérite close-up shots of the Chicks backstage at the KPÖ Youth Communist paper 20 year celebration in Vienna back in 2000; the film was made by Tina Frank of Mego. The whole movie was filmed with a wobbly handheld video camera (like Blair Witch) in some acrobatic positions. Confusion was all part of the Chix act intent on subverting people who have gotten used to the cheap & easy entertainment offered to them by multinational music conglomerates, MTV and radio's Top 40 lists. "Anti-Spice Girls", indeed, as their friend Miss Kittin once called them.
A mechanical vocoder voice that kept insistently repeating "Chicks on Speed" kicked it all off. The start of the show was marred by some technical problems which are always the salt of every decent CoS gonzoid performance. The mantra-like 'Chix Machine' backing track was almost rendered inaudible. The Chicks entered screaming to the trash metal sounds of 'Never Go Home'. Then it was time for a change of mood with 'Glamour Girl', a parody of the cheesiest elements of house music, accompanied by the video filmed in Israel. Appropriately, as the video screen descended, it hit some microphones, causing extra noise to the performance.
'Sell-Out/Don't Work, Trade!', the performance/talk show part of the evening followed with Chicks doing some live trading with audiences on stage. They traded with such stuff as an enamel pin by Carsten Nicolai and Alex's white boots ("They are a bit smelly") changing owners, and 'Trading Post' video filmed during Chicks TV performance running in the background. Then they performed 'Lush Life', an autobiographical song about the Chicks' time in Munich: "Living in a boring town, where you have to make up for it and entertain yourself", which sounded all too familiar for Tampere locals. Next was the urban nightmare of 'Night of the Pedestrian' and the CoS re-writing of Malaria!'s early-80s 'Kaltes Klares Wasser', which reached No. 16 on German chart.
The audience, demanding harder stuff from the Chicks got 'Procrastinator', based on the disturbed life of Japanese female artist Yayoi Kusama. Kiki, usually the most quiet Chick, let out a real trash metal scream-o-rama during the song. Then, they went into 'We Don't Play Guitars' that would later come out as a single. With its guitar-sampling driving rhythm, it combined ZZ Top's dancier moments to The Beastie Boys style semi-raps. 'The Floating Pyramid Over Frankfurt that the Taxi Driver Saw When He Was Landing' followed and was a surreal girly chant, with pseudo-Krautrock trappings.
Before the encore the girls hid behind a large white banner with the text "We don't have time to save you now! Save yourself, save yourself", held by Club Telex extras. The Chicks then took the stage over again with FSK/Camper Van Beethoven's 'Euro Trash Girl', followed by the Chicks' original 'Yes I Do', done in 1998 with the German band Die Goldene Zitronen. It was then time for the final encore for the sweaty audience as the Chicks were joined by the local Club Telex Noise Ensemble, who jammed together with the ladies doing a (sort of) rendition of the Finnish electronic music classic 'Kaukana väijyy ystäviä'. Kiki's Sherman Filter Bank was joined by a vacuum cleaner and cornet. A fitting avantgarde(?) (anti?)climax for the night, which was topped by the Chix shouting their trademark "Never go home! Never go home!" all over the trashy ending.
Chix did their best to confuse Tampere audiences, so this was not your typical rock show. Pre-recorded background music came from a MiniDisc while Kiki messed up sounds live with her Sherman Filter Bank effects box. Alex and Melissa provided unrelenting vocals over the mess, sometimes screaming aloud and jumping all over. They even nearly rapped a bit, yet sometimes sounded incredibly vulnerable.
I wrote about the event:
The strategy of Chicks on Speed is to incite chaos wherever they go. So what if they don't play their own instruments in the traditional air-guitar stadium sense? What really counts are the ideas and attitudes behind it and the Chicks have a lot of those to share. That's what punk was all about; everyone can do it, you don't have to be a virtuoso musician. Just get connected and lend your own personality to the game.
Chicks on Speed lend female faces to this type of music usually dominated by nerdy bedroom producers with their "faceless techno bollocks". Unlike the boys who try to impress each other with the sheer volume of their record collections or their instrumental skills, the Chicks don't sweat their technique. Instead of showing off immaculate DJ beatmixing skills or technical studio wizardry the Chicks just do it, which is what makes them brilliant. Chicks on Speed are an inspiration not only to the girls wanting to make it in the male-dominated alt.rock world but to everyone who wants to let their creative juices flow without being afraid to do so. People don't have to have a fear of "lacking skills" or justify their talent to appeal to the messed up ideals of a star obsessed music business. "Yes I Do", the Chicks say, and so can you!
For the Club Telex night taking place on the 6th of April 2001, as for some reason we weren't able to book Yo-Talo this time around, Telex exceptionally took place at the club-restaurant-theatre Telakka, starring Jeans Team and Peaches, both part of the artist roster of Kitty-Yo Records, Berlin. At that time, Kitty-Yo was one of trendiest indie labels around, and I recall Club Telex got both of them booked as part of some package mini-tour of Finland, consisting of gigs also to Helsinki and Turku. Another Kitty-Yo artist, Chilly Gonzales, was also supposed to perform, but he had to cancel.
Berlin's Jeans Team were four friendly neighbourhood lads straight out some 1960s type of band promo picture, à la The Monkees. They were some really sympathetic guys, their music being a mix of indie guitars and synthpop, with an occasional Krautrock/Stereolabish overtone. There was a neonlight Jeans Team logo as their backdrop. All their hits were heard such as 'Baby', and of course, 'Keine Melodien' ("Ich singe keine Melodie... ich singe EINS, ZWEI, DREI, VIER!!!"), at the time a minor club hit also in Tampere.
During that era Peaches was often classified as another artist in the Electroclash fad (usually a blend of retro style, new-wavish synthpop, techno, electro and disco, with some fashion show visuals) that was despised by all "real electro" fans. Despite that, Peaches would prove her resilience and is still around a quarter of century later when the memory of most other acts representing the Electroclash craze has totally faded. The visual style of Electroclash was heavily inspired by Liquid Sky, Slava Tsukerman's 1982 film, which I also heard mini and Peaches exchanging some words about when hanging at Telakka's backstage.
It transpired that Peaches, a.k.a. Merrill Nisker, went through a total transformation before my eyes. I had changed a couple of words with her at backstage before the show and had been surprised: that can this tiny little, ordinary-looking (appearing – at least – twice as young as her 34 years) Canadian-Jewish girl with a curly dark hair really be the Peaches, the notorious sex monster, the Scarlet Woman, who in the lyrics of her biggest hit 'Fuck the Pain Away' (2000) insists us to "sucking on my titties like you wanted me" and offers us "pussy galore" and other carnal delights.
Instead, on stage Peaches became a fierce-ruling diva dominatrix in a shiny black PVC outfit, high heel boots and Coca Cola bottle-coloured aviator shades, being scary as hell, a real wet nightmare. Peaches took over the stage completely like a she-devil electro punk grrrl incarnation of Elvis or Gene Simmons, waving her microphone in a way that left little room for interpretation, sometimes using it as a lasso too. In the intimate club space of Telakka, its cosy forest cabin-like atmosphere as a stark contrast to her stage show, she was really close to her audience, both physically and mentally.
As the show advanced, the PVC outfit dropped off, leaving a see-through blouse (she apparently wore no bra) and red hotpants. Like some dark Madonna, Peaches worked the stage for an hour and half with her "MC5" (Roland MC-505 Groovebox) and occasional guitar, gesturing fearsomely like a demon, with a mocking "Thank – you – very – much" after every song. There was this extremely drunken young guy in the audience, perhaps part of Jyväskylä's Rikos Records posse, howling and yelling with some of his best American redneck accent, and drooling after Peaches, to which the artist responded to by teasing and generally fucking the poor guy around. I've hardly ever seen any artist taking her or his audience with such a determined concentration, total stage presence and overpowering charisma. In retrospect, Peaches was one of the biggest stars Club Telex ever had, her reputation only rising in the years that followed.
Electro Is Aural Sex
Ever since the 1980s, Tampere has had a strong gothic rock scene, with Jyrki Virtanen (a.k.a. Jyrki Witch), of the cult band Two Witches, as one of its most prominent movers and shakers. Under the gothic umbrella, also such genres as synthpop, à la Depeche Mode, and EBM (Electronic Body Music, a type of early dark industrial techno originating from Belgium) were flourishing. Advanced Art was the biggest act in Tampere representing this style, their 1980s and 90s releases now enjoying quite a cult reputation. In the early 1990s, Carri Suksia and his friends were running their own Frantic club, in the third floor of Laterna in Puutarhakatu, and publishing an EBM/industrial/gothic fanzine, also called Frantic.
There were some differing opinions on what "electro" actually was as music: either a type of synthpop, EBM and darkwave sound, or, as the word was used in America from the early 1980s on: an electronic musical style, originally a subgenre of hip hop, of mostly Afro-American artists such as Afrika Bambaataa, and all its musical derivatives that followed and would eventually spread around the world.
Streetwave, a British label run by Morgan Khan, licensed tracks from the twelve-inches of Stateside electro artists and released them on the highly influential Street Sounds Electro compilations, thus helping to spread the American electro sound to England and the continental Europe in the 1980s. "Electro Is Aural Sex" was the tagline of Street Sounds compilations, later on also pinched by Imatran Voima to the record sleeve of their first 12" in 2000.
From 1997, when I witnessed I-f’s (playing as Ferenc) set at Jyväskylä’s festival and instantly became converted, to perhaps 2005-06 when I quit DJing, it was electro (or to be more precise, its second or third wave, if we take into account its Stateside originators in the 80s) that ruled supreme, with some other related genres also squirming into our sets, such as IDM, EBM, synthpop/futu, Italodisco, Hi-NRG, even a bit of dub & hip hop, and yeah, some good old 4/4 techno; with some occasional, erm, Electroclash, too – yes, now it can all be confessed since there isn’t any personal “street cred” to hold on to anymore (if there ever was).
Alongside Club Telex, there were also some events dedicated purely to electro. In February 2001 we had as electronic live acts from Holland, representing the legendary Bunker Records, both Legowelt and Orgue Electronique.
Club Telex Legacy
The essential nature of "underground" experience is that it's elusive and temporary. It vanishes as soon as one tries to catch it or pin it down. In the end, there will be only a bunch of old people croaking around and reminiscing those long lost moments when one possibly managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of it. In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." And that's the way it is, really.
Was the electro journey worth taking? Sure, there were a lot of things that, in retrospect, should have been left undone, should have been left unsaid. Maybe there’s still someone out there who harbours resentment. Apologies accepted or not, call it a learning process. But despite any personal blunders there might have been, the music was good, and that’s the only real thing worth remembering.
Musical fashions change rapidly. For a couple of years in the late 1990s and the first years of the Noughties, electro was “hip”, then something else came along. Since the millennium we’ve had EDM, trap, vaporwave, synthwave, and loads of other new genres born almost every year that it’s totally impossible to keep up with them anymore. Also techno has been revived for the Berghain generation. Classic Italodisco of the 1980s seems to hold its cultish popularity among the club hipsters, year after year. As for electro, probably there will be another full-fledged revival one day, as it seems any type of electronic music will eventually create its own “trad” following, in the way of “classic rock”, as can also be witnessed from the ever-rising popularity of analogue instruments.
Some decades on, it’s hard to assess any real significance that an event like Club Telex may have had. All comments and memories from the people who actually were there seem more or less random. In any case, it took place in a sort of watershed era when the old rave culture of warehouses and illegal parties – that had prevailed in the late 1980s and early 90s – was already fading away, increasingly replaced by the commercial clubs and the emerging superstar DJs. In local party scene, hip hop and drum & bass, and on the other hand, trance, were ever more popular, but genre-wise, Club Telex was still something else.
Tampere was, and still is, a somewhat provincial, parochial town outside the biggest cultural hubs of Europe. If there was a local “underground” of any sort, it was represented by a handful of people at its best. Everything was extremely small-scale and zero-budget. Rock music of the 1970s and 80s still ruled the domestic airwaves. Imported music magazines from the UK, USA or Germany were the main source if you wanted to find anything about the artists and record labels that fell outside this hegemony of hard rock guitars and the ephemeral dance pop acts that dominated the radioplay (in that respect, not much has changed since those days). The Internet and social media were in its infancy, with no streaming services for music and videos in existence yet.
In this environment, the existence of an electronic, audiovisual event like Club Telex, that at least tried to offer something else, probably felt more significant than it might have been, for example, in today’s social media-saturated climate where people are accustomed to find any old and new music and culture, however marginal, at just one keyboard click.
The essence of Club Telex in one track:
'Kaukana väijyy ystäviä' by M.A. Numminen & Sähkökvartetti, as a cover version of Club Telex Noise Ensemble
(a short-lived project that was born as a spin-off of the club nights), and remixed by Legowelt from the Netherlands.
But enough with the ranting, get this compilation if you want to get a little taste of what the millennial Finnish electro was all about. It’s full of lost gems, such as Imatran Voima’s ‘It’s Time to Testify’ from their first EP (Kostamus Records, 2000). You can also check Erkko's rare Finnish electro mix, with even more (almost) forgotten tracks.
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