An interview with Pasi Mäkelä

"- There for sure was not exactly one idea behind... We struggled first year or 2 with composed material, kind of a prog rock pop, but not really reaching the goals, and not satisfying, between we slowly started more and more just improvise, and play the sounds as they came, I felt that there is some structures all the time in the air, that we just had to catch them, and move freely with it. We created own counting systems for the music, not time signatures or such but for times when we don't play... pretty hard to explain. I also had kind of an idea to have a connection between the east and west, bizarre Tuvan throat singing meeting the broken blues and free funk rock. I have plenty of influence from free jazz (Also from Polish jazz, Tomasz Stanko, Kurylewicz etc.) and from the more out there rock music, Beefheart, Residents, and later the krautrock stuff, which I didnt yet know in läski times so much. Also the Finnish underground music throughout has been our inspiration. M.A. Numminen, The Sperm, Pekka Airaksinen, Sielun Veljet, Edward Vesala projects etc. Me and my läski friends were also very inspired by African popular music from 1970's.

We recorded our improvisations with cassette machines and reel tape recorder, all is live recordnings, with counting method and parts of longer jams and impros. 

Po Rong In Roo was something we repeated actually.

-In the first years we rehearsed quite a lot, few times a week several hours in the evenings. We had nice base in rehearsal space Nosturi (not existing anymore) in Helsinki, HIM rehearsed in the next room and we often joked that there is the most known finnish band and here is the most unknown, hahah. I had strong believe that we will DO something! hahahah! We played were we could and arranged in different venues our own annual läski fest for 8 times. But we where completely and utterly outsiders. They played our music on Finnish national tv but didnt credit us, and then we played on big book fair a notorious concert which emptied the auditorium and it was even in the tv news but without sound. HAHAHA.

We had pretty close call that Chicago based locust music didn't publish our first CD, but they bankrupted. So obscurity is the place.

  

We had used nice or crappy 1960's 70's gear. We kicked out our drummer for some strange and not so strange reasons, 

and then we had to make rotation on the drum seat, which changed the feeling all the time. Everybody had different style for drums. It was funny, everything how it supposed to sound somehow vanished. Because we did not want to play the ideal music, we played what was there left, what nobody wants, hence the name läski, fat.

I don't know if these answers to your questions. But thank you for interest!

Have a nice weekend!