Releases with Kompleksi Available on Juno (UK)

Two brand new releases with Kompleksi tracks can now be ordered through Juno, UK:

Electronic Bible 2 compilation CD (White Label Records, UK), featuring Kompleksi's '(I Ain't No) Lovechild':

http://www.juno.co.uk/ppps/products/206864-01.htm

Artists Anonymous compilation 12" (Bunker Records, Holland), featuring Kompleksi's 'Porno Tampere' (in collaboration with Polytron):

http://www.juno.co.uk/ppps/products/215486-01.htm

Note that Artists Anonymous 12" is only limited to 350 copies!

Harri Teikka Asks:

Spring the Merciless

Spring has finally arrived to Tampere. Sun, that merciless burning eye in the sky, makes strange things to one's hormonal balance, and the effects are not always pleasant. Love and romance? Don't make me laugh. Once again that feeling of being a Ghost at Noon as if being helplessly lost in some painting by DeChirico. Those miserable byproducts of society (in whom one perhaps glimpses one's impending future), bums and mental cases have crept out of their holes after a long dark winter: at their most harmless just annoying, at their worst downright scary. Sometimes one feels being only one thread away from them, only just... One learns to trace every step carefully, always on the lookout on what's or who's ahead. Geography of Fear. Just think that some total stranger would like to blow your head off. Just because it's there. No other reason really.

Self-medication? Thanks, but I'm on a reality trip, and after all these years my armour is stronger than ever. Hey, these days it's my task to keep you standing, not vice versa. Take it as it comes, even if it comes hard. You can keep your co-dependencies and personal problems; as for me, I'm on a mission.

Flying sand from the roads gets into one's eyes, nostrils and mouth. It's bad enough already if one is allergic too. Nevertheless, one strolls on.

Harri Teikka Wants To Be Your Friend!

The Gospel According to Judas

Appropriately for Easter, National Geographic magazine recently published on their Website a Coptic text -- found already in the 1970s from Egypt -- and an excerpt of its English translation. This Gnostic and apocryphal text is called The Gospel of Judas.

The Gospel of Judas gives a different view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas, offering new insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus. Unlike the accounts in the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in which Judas is portrayed as a reviled traitor, this newly discovered Gospel portrays Judas as acting at Jesus' request when he hands Jesus over to the authorities.

http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/

The Gnosis Archive

http://personal.inet.fi/business/molari/juudas.pdf (in Finnish)

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Juri on Judas & Jorge Luis Borges

Samuel Beckett 100 Years

pHinnWeb congratulates.

A Job Interview

"When I stay outside, I stay free." -Louise Bourgeois

Some time ago I had a job interview for a post of an assistant editor at an art magazine. Since employment office is now pushing me to get some sort of job, I thought that would be a bit better choice for me than shovelling shit or cleaning up construction sites.

Struggling through the slushy streets, I arrived to the interview in time. They said I had to wait before they would talk to me, so I checked the art exhibition downstairs before appearing in front of the Spanish Inquisition. I saw some rubberfoam contraptions and pieces of cloth lying on the floor: obviously this was a work of art.

Then I was asked to the upstairs office to meet this committee of three bespectacled women. Reminding me of those witches in Macbeth, I noticed that there was an older woman, a stern one and obviously the boss, and two younger ones.

Feeling about as comfortable as a butterfly pinned to formica, I duly presented some newspaper clippings of the articles written by me, some of my own artwork (which left the ladies blank-faced) and other stuff, answered to my best abilities such questions as the meaning of art to me and so on, and tried to boast my skills the best I could. The longer I sat there, the more uncomfortable I started to feel about the whole situation. What the hell was I doing here? Probably they thought I was a flake. At least that was the feeling I got.

Now I got an e-mail from them, thanking me for my interest and telling me someone else had been chosen as the assistant editor. Whew, what a relief. I don't think working with a middle-aged bitch with menopausal moodswings fussing behind me all the time would really have been my idea of fun anyway.

pHreak Out!

Hawkwind: The Spirit of the [R]Age

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
- Hunter S. Thompson

As quoted by Hawkwind's on-off managerial type Douglas Smith, these words by the late "gonzo" writer Thompson might well crystallize the story of this legendary "spacerock" band (and probably also British cousins to German Krautrock acts of the same era), as accounted by Carol Clerk in her The Saga of Hawkwind (Omnibus Press, 2004).

And what a dirty saga it is, as I found from Clerk's book I just finished. Hawkwind which got its beginnings in the days of UK's flower power scene and communal spirit of the late 1960s, as a "people's band" (like their peers Edgar Broughton Band, Deviants and Pink Fairies), has underwent several line-up changes, the most famous of these ensembles consisting up to mid-70s of Hawkwind's self-declared "captain", guitarist/vocalist Dave Brock, mischievous sax player Nik Turner (Brock's future nemesis), the amphetamine-fuelled bassist Ian "Lemmy" Kilminster (best known from Motörhead, of course, the band he founded after having been kicked out of Hawkwind), electronics guys Del Dettmar and Dikmik, plus drummer Simon King. Not to forget Stacia, their six feet (180 cm) tall Amazon-like naked dancer.

By the time Hawkwind reach the 21st century, the only remaining original member is Dave Brock. Behind them are not only loads of albums -- some of them undeniable classics, some of them bootleg drivel -- but also countless behind-the-scenes bickerings, accusations of financial rip-offs and records released without permission from other band members, court cases, back-stabbings and innuendo. Musicians sacked as the result of "personal problems" and ruthless band politics. Nik Turner accusing Dave Brock of this, Dave Brock accusing Nik Turner of that (most likely both cases of the kettle calling the pot black). Everybody thinking Dave Brock either as a hero or a villain. One of the best known Hawkwind tracks is called 'Spirit of the Age', and this is exactly how it feels: the band changing along the times from the easy-going, communal and sharing Zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s to the greedier and more egotistic times of the 1980s, 90s and early 21st century. All this reads like Spinal Tap but many times more as tragedy than comedy.

Recommended, perhaps essential reading to everyone who plans a career in music business; with tons of excellent advice on how NOT to handle things, business and personal relations.

Hawkwind in Tampere, May 2005

Starchild

"... he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something."

- Arthur C. Clarke: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Delusions of grandeur and low self-esteem being different sides of the same coin (as are manic and depressive), one struggles for years to attain some sort of stable and "realistic" mindset and worldview, not to speak about... ahem, cough... "peace of mind", but the paradox lies therein that the world really does not seem to revolve around any "realistic" and "rational" standards. The more one tries to give up one's negative qualities such as the solipsistic self-centredness, egotism, greed and envy (and any other such things that were in the pre-Enlightenment times called "mortal sins"), the more one becomes disillusioned by the fact that even though these qualities are officially frowned upon, in the world of prevailing double standards (and double-binds), these are actually encouraged and found positive! Because aren't these exactly the ideals of the world of aggressive, ever-expanding capitalism seeking ever-larger profits, and also of the obsessive-compulsive media cult of celebrity? An imminent moral decline may ensue -- why should one seek to pursue any high moral standards when society and the whole world around one seem to refuse to do so? Is man in fact a higher entity full of divine potential, or just an animal amongst other animals? Blessed be those who can sleep their nights in peace without having to worry about any moral constraints!

As for yours truly, I'm at the moment seeking for strength and some sort of, ahem, spiritual guidance, even though I don't exactly know what the source of that would exactly be.

The main task at hand, of course, would be finding a publisher for our long-prepared album. I don't want to publish myself any more because without having any sort of decent distribution that's virtually a dead-end job, and in fact I'm planning to fold pHinnMilk Recordings after the release of Club Telex Noise Ensemble's CTNERMX II remix collection (there's still not enough material together for that compilation, so that will yet take some time).

My own DJ activities seem to have waned, withered away and vanished altogether. I don't know why; there just hasn't been an appropriate occasion or no one has asked me to play, and I haven't been into pushing myself any more. I'm not into being a "genre DJ", anyway, and I'm not too enthusiastic about being classified as an "electro DJ" or an "IDM DJ", or whatever. Why can't I play in the same set, for example, some Drexciya tracks, a bit of Bollywood film music and perhaps an old Scott Walker song? Because that confuses people, messes up those little neatly categorized and tightly separated genre boxes in their brains. Plus of course, there's always the question of "technical competence": it was quite describing when I once asked from a local DJ if I could perhaps play at one of their clubs, and he just quipped: "Just when you have learned to mix"; then probably realising just how blunt this sounded, added something like "perhaps some time in the future, we'll see". And that was it, in the end I never heard from the guy.

So, "sore grapes, pHinn", you might say now, but the fact is that I don't really care. With DJing, I can really take it or leave it, and the scales seem to have tipped for the latter. Once there was a time when there was nothing I could have wanted more.

Anyway, "don't complain, don't explain" seems to be the rule of thumb here. Any perceived injustices don't matter, and talking about those only indicates paranoia and persecution syndrome, going against the "happy-go-lucky" ideal.

Making our own music is more important at the moment anyway than playing someone else's (I've already done here my whining about the difficulties of arranging clubs, etc. etc. etc.; just check the archives if having a morbid interest in that). Doing Kompleksi, I think with Mike Not we are a working team, and on many occasions I've noticed even a sort of musical telepathy between us (for the lack of a better word), when doing a track everything just seems to "click", and no further explanations are needed. Just like "this is exactly how I would have done it myself".

Now I have a strong feeling this is why I am on this planet. This is my purpose.

Recalling Germany Calling and Deutsch Rock - Part 3

Here is the third and final part of David McConnell's article on the late Ian McDonald's harsh and undeserved criticism of Krautrock in NME, 1973.

The Drift: The Return of Scott Walker

There's a new article related to Scott Walker's forthcoming album The Drift on WFMU's blog: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/04/the_return_of_s.html

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Momus on The Drift

Goddammit, now it seems I can hardly wait to get this album in my hands!

[Scott Walker @ pHinnWeb]

pHinnWeb Chart April 2006

Can be found here.

And don't forget that pHinnWeb celebrates its 10 years this month! Yes, we're a ten-year old freckle-faced little rascal now, the terror of all teachers and a mind full of all kinds of devious tricks to shake the neighbourhood! So it's time to put your funny hats on and open the bottles of bubbly! I want to entertain you! Party now, rehab later!