Once Upon a Time... ex (1994)
As to its other content, ex was profiled as an urban lifestyle magazine, with its very title referencing the perceived target group: "Generation X", the people born approximately in between the years 1965 and 1980. The goal of ex was to offer a fresh alternative to the established "city culture" publications in Finland, namely City and Image, that had originated in the mid-1980s which already felt like ancient times.
For the first issue of ex, out in April 1994, acting editor-in-chief was Ville Tiikkonen, and the magazine's production and marketing were also handled by Antti Viitanen, who had previously worked at the financial paper Kauppalehti. Samu Mielonen provided a lot of technical groundwork for the ex magazine, also doing his share as one of its writers. Generally, ex magazine's contributors comprised a mixed group of people, many of them working as DJs or otherwise involved in music promotion. The first issue was produced as a volunteer effort, with two major advertisers covering the printing costs.
“City and Image are clearly magazines intended for older people, maybe even a bit outdated in the eyes of young readers. Our generation hasn’t had its own magazine, and we aim to fill this gap,” Antti Viitanen boldly claimed.
Regarding those predecessors (and perceived competitors) of ex, City had been founded as a glossy, arty magazine in 1985 by Eeropekka Rislakki and Kim Weckström, as its purpose to bring to Finland "city culture" which had mostly been missing from this country before. At least, that was the general idea at the time. In 1986 City's format was changed to a free monthly tabloid along with the paper's new editor-in-chief, Kari Kivelä, who further developed City towards a more popular style, filled with lifestyle content, club and restaurant news, street fashion, and entertainment listings.
Image, another "lifestyle magazine" had also seen its start in 1985, gradually developing from a somewhat elitist art and fashion-oriented glossy publication into a kind of general magazine covering culture, politics, and human interest content.
Both City and Image signified the era of deregulation in Finland, when "city culture" began to replace the previously rigid hierarchical structures, which in Finland had been represented, for example, by a very strictly regulated restaurant culture where you had to follow a stringently adhered dress code if you wanted to enter a club and also to submit to the tightly controlled licensing laws, early closing times, and so on. All this was to change during the 1980s which also saw the start of commercial radio in Finland. Furthermore, this new kind of mood was reflected in Finnish cinema, as Aki Kaurismäki's films full of postmodern references and ironic humour began to replace the serious social and historical domestic drama that had prevailed until then.
The previous patriotic-conservative pathos and, on the other hand, the highly politicised atmosphere of the 1970s began to give way to a new leisure- and individual-centered hedonism. Of course, all this connected to the international trends of the 1980s, such as the rise of yuppie culture and the so-called spirit of free entrepreneurship, which began to be emphasised as the new prevailing mindset.
But by 1994, even this ethos had already been replaced by something else, at least it had undergone a sort of mutation as the padded shoulders of the 80s chic hipsters gave way to the design smiley T-shirts and baggy jeans of the ravers. The gradually advancing internationalisation and, on the other hand, the end of the Cold War – for the time being – had had their own significance. Young people travelled more than before and saw the world outside their home country, the Internet was rapidly on its way, information and new influences moved across borders at the speed of light.
ex magazine's clear intention was to reflect this new Zeitgeist. Whereas the previous baby boomer generation's ideals had been towards general social and political consciousness, now it was "street credibility" that counted. Markku Savolainen wrote in the first issue of ex that: "Everyone knows them, and they know everyone. They have stolen the most beautiful girls right from under our noses and walked past the line to get in. They are the street-credible." Never mind such old-fashioned values as civic virtue, in the post-Thatcher age of individualism this kind of rhetoric was unbeatable.
To promote the first issue of ex magazine, copies were sent to six hundred advertising agency ADs around Finland, with initial plans to gather the reader base from Finnish university towns. The first edition was 2,600 copies. Distribution was also targeted to art schools and record stores.
The large format magazine was printed on heavy paper stock. Typography was heavily influenced by such trendy US magazines of the day as Ray Gun, an alternative rock publication, and Emigre, a graphic design magazine, both representing the experimental avantgarde edge, with some bold typefaces, fonts and occasionally cryptic layouts.
Techno music and rave culture had brought along a new visual style and Emigre had dedicated one of its issues to Britain's Designers Republic, a graphic design house that was at the forefront of electronic dance music's some of most striking imagery of record sleeves and event flyers. Also Frontpage, a German techno magazine represented similar aesthetics, with some snazzy graphics and layout that readers found unreadable from time to time.
ex was an ambitious undertaking. From its pages one could find tons and tons of electronic dance music content, interviews with such fêted techno music personalities as DJ Sven Väth, there were loads of record reviews, DJ and club charts. There were feature stories on such controversial subjects as psychedelics and conspiracy theories, both highly topical in the early 1990s rave culture Zeitgeist. Antti Viitala photographed all the coolest club personalities for the pages of ex. There was an extensive behind-the-scenes story on the experimental record sleeves of Sähkö Recordings that with the releases of Mika Vainio and Jimi Tenor had internationally become the most sought-after label from Finland, even though the established Finnish music media showed some bare interest only when Sähkö's records had already been celebrated on the pages of British and European magazines.
Unfortunately it turned out to be that ex was perhaps too big for their britches as the marketplace showed its cold reality. What would have been fine for a fanzine, admittedly with a grandiose design and massive workload of creative and technical knowhow invested in it, didn't exactly work out in the Finnish mediascene of the mid-1990s, still recovering from the early decade's economic recession and anyway with general conservative ideas concerning any possible changes to the state of things. For starters, the magazine's sheer size turned out to be troublesome. The costs of mailing and distributing ex became too huge, especially for an independent operator who didn't have the backing of any traditional media houses to take care of sheer logistics.
Harri Hännikäinen, also a member of Sähkö Recordings, told that for every three issues the layout was created over one exhausting weekend that took its toll on the staff of ex. One of these occasions was etched on everyone's memory when on Saturday 9 April 1994, in the middle of another sweaty and excruciating layout session, Samu Mielonen was browsing the Internet, still in its infancy at this point, and found from the newsgroups a rumour of Kurt Cobain's death which was later promptly confirmed.
Except for the efforts of ex and later on, Basso magazine (which shared its column space with hip hop), Finland has never had a specialist print publication dedicated purely to electronic dance music. Sure, there were occasional stories in newspapers like Helsingin Sanomat and such rock magazines as Soundi and Rumba have written their share about techno, ambient and related genres but those articles have always been prudishly hidden somewhere in between the larger feature stories of, for example, Finland's latest metal import bands or whichever revival guitar band was being favoured by the critics at the time. Soon afterwards, it was the Internet and later on, social media, that took on the task of spreading information on these marginal styles but it was hardly concentrated in the way you could all that info in one and the same place. For this fact only, ex will remain in history.
So, ex folded only after three issues published but leaving behind it admittedly a significant piece of Finnish scene history. Among the contributors of ex was Markku "Cosmo" Salmi (1950 - 2024) whose writings were also found on Tekno. Digitaalisen tanssimusiikin historia, filosofia ja tulevaisuus ("Techno. The history, philosophy, and future of digital dance music"), an anthology book edited by Sam Inkinen and also published in 1994. Despite all criticisms thrown around by their contemporaries, it was both Inkinen's book and ex that established a groundwork on what would be written about Finnish electronic music scene in the coming years.
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