Keijo

2008 release "According to Indian mythology everything was born and will be born with vibration, sound. What Western civilization calls music, is narrow, nothing but strictly controlled thread in that vibrating area. Other kind of threads have been mastered elsewhere. Inevitably these threads will also face each other and become one. Basic note chimes in blues, raga and mantra. I dreamt of musics and players who can modulate with music, no matter which cultural background they come from – I felt I understood something about the sounds I sometimes heard in the evening just before falling into sleep and in the morning when I woke up."

Keijo Virtanen (Kheta Hotem, Free Players, Rambling Boys) makes his long distance walk into the stream of folk/countryblues continuum. These marvellously rusty and dusty tracks have been cooking with tender flame in Keijo’s mind&soul for a good while: "When I was just a little boy, I used to just lay down under the blanket (just before falling to sleep) randomly switching the channels of our transistor radio. Under the crunches and washes I also found the new pirate radio stations and there, among the speeches came out the echoing, rhythmic, electric guitar music.

Eventually under rock music and British pop music I discovered the sounds of the black people of North America. I felt like those deep singing voices and wailing guitars would somehow also belong to this kind of environment, to rural, middle-of-nowhere Finland, surrounded by wildlife and physical work with our own hands and whatever we may get grown from the land. Blues was burning onto recordings in Jyväskylä and Kuusankoski, Finland 2006-2007. Thanks to Lauri Hartman for burning his guitar."