RFI: Music of Finland, Finns (Seven Deadly), Finnish Rock, Electronic, etc Music

I sure wish I knew how to sing in Finnish so I could sing along to my Varttina cd.

very good live, tho i am not sure if i liked them - they had intense stage presence, vocals were amazing, band was pretty good but i felt more interested than won over. i do not offer this as any sort of definitive opinion on them let alone finnish music.

Mataleena, that young maid,
that bitter and twisted young maid -
her heart is darkness,
a land where nothing came to good.

She'd had three baby boys,
three she'd given birth to:
three swaddled bairns
she'd had for her own.

Mataleena, that young maid,
bitter and twisted young maid -
her heart is darkness,
a memory of old evil.

One of them she set fire to.
He became a bright-glowing coal.
It was fire that lulled him to sleep,
flames that made moan for him.

The second she threw in the water,
held him under the waves.
It was the sea-swell that rocked him,
dark ocean that took him.

She dug a pit in the woods for the third,
laid him to sleep in a grove.
His cradle is birch-trees, swaying,
they watch over his everlasting sleep.

That's what she did with her three baby boys,
the three she'd given birth to.

Varttina have cool lyrics

MA Numminen ! People, read this and weep :
http://www.ma-numminen.net/eng/who.shtml

Besides developing a range of synthesizers that aimed to radicalize the performer’s relationship to sound and image (including the DIMI-T, an instrument controlled by electrodes that measured changes in brain activity, and the DIMI-0, which transformed video images into music in real-time – built in 1971), Kurenniemi also created the world’s first commercially manufactured and marketed microcomputer in 1973. And that’s not to mention his forays into the field of electronic music and media art – or his career as a professor of Nuclear Physics.

In sixties he was arrested for obscenity, due to singing passages out of a sex education pamphlet. Other sixties songs of his featured lyrics out of a horse grooming manual and the Finnish law for obscene publications. He's also recorded old swing tunes in Finnish, as well as Baccara's "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie". Last time I saw him sing was at my faculty's semester opening party, where he sang The Faculty of Social Science's Set of Principles and Scenario for the Future.

So. Any good Finnish boybands about?

I might start a thread on INTERNATIONAL BOYBANDS.

Whenever I watch the Finnish channel at the foax it does somewhat confirm the stereotype by CONSTANTLY showing some sort of soap where people sit around the table and stare gloomily into their coffee for hours (it gets sort of addictive when you can't leave the house for a couple of hours).

(ie I haven't found any Finnish pop music programmes yet).

I think there's only been one proper Finnish boyband (in the Take That / Backstreet Boys mode), and that was a nineties band called XL5. Unfortunately I can't find their videos on Youtube, but you can enjoy this great song about Helsinki city boys instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEVuUql_yBA

So. Any good Finnish boybands about?

N Sinki?

I think these days the closest equivalent to a Finnish boyband are glam rock bands with young, good-looking guys. The most popular ones are Negative and Lovex, I think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRel_1BEFsA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDfm2IbNpIE

As far I know, their basic fanbase is the same as that of proper boybands, i.e. (pre)teen girls who dig their looks.

Btw, lately I've been diggind old Finnish schlagers, and whaddayouknow, someone has put up a fan video for my favourite tune from the fifties. It even has an English summary of the lyrics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGZq57zEY9g

The singer, Tapio Rautavaara, also won the gold metal for javelin at the 1948 summer olympics, so he was quite the renaissance man.

Other famed Finnish scenes:

- Old-school extreme metal. Mostly death (Xysma, Demilich, Demigod, Lubricant, Amorphis), doom (Thergothon, Unholy, Skepticism) and a few black metal (Beherit, Impaled Nazarene).

- "Suomi saundi": a subgenre of psychedelic trance spearheaded by Texas Faggott, on Exogenic Records.

I think I've seen Texas Faggot live years ago, they did a fine job in turning one of the worst genres in electronic music history into something tolerable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3giCNAU_NYM

I don't normally share any Finnish music in here, but this song/video has hit me harder than anything from this country in a long time... It straddles a very fine line between eroticism and gothic death-love (the title translates to "open your hair, Medusa" - the narrator is welcoming Medusa to turn her into stone so she can enter oblivion) but never becomes corny, just amazing.