Waltari
Rock Scene Is Dying

21.01.2011

A Waltari show is a unique experience you will never forget. As long as you are not opposed to mixing various styles of metal with strange kinds of outside influences, you are bound to enjoy what these five Finns are doing onstage. To make this experience even more impressive, we decided to meet the band before they hit the stage in Moscow, Russia, and to discuss with singer/bassist Kartsy Hatakka his approach to songwriting, his work on mixing metal with classical music, his solo project and a lot of other Waltari-related stuff. Kartsy turned out exactly the kind of person whom you would imagine behind such music – a bit out of this world, but very intelligent and very positive.

You are coming back to Russia after a four-year break. What were your impressions from your first visit to Moscow back in 2006? Did it live up to your expectations?

It was really positive, but you know, we didn’t have any expectations. We were planning to come to Russia many times over the years, in the 1990s and during our whole career, but for some practical reasons it never happened before 2006. Always when we come to a new place, we go there not knowing what to expect, but the result was very positive and very lively.

You are known as a person who listens to a wide variety of music styles. Are you familiar with any Russian music?

Too little, not so much unfortunately. I would like to know more, but I have been too busy to listen to any music except my own during the last two years. I’m sure there is some interesting stuff. In fact, during our last visit somebody gave me some CDs, and I gave them a try, and most of them sounded very interesting. I think there is some cross-over and open-minded stuff in Russia, too.

Can you describe in a few words the evolution of your musical tastes? How did you start – not as a musician, but as a listener? Did you begin with listening to metal and then discover everything else? Or did you begin with punk?

I have a very long legacy as a music listener, because I have three elder brothers, and they all were 60s hippies. I have heard music at home since I remember, since two or three years old. I have gone through all these different periods of rock history. During the 80s I started to find my own favorite bands which I personally like, but much before that I was scrolling through all the classic bands from the 60s and 70s. In the 80s I started to be a big fan of metal and rap music, and electronic music, and gothic music. It’s the mixture that maybe created the style of Waltari – we are adding all the music styles of the 80s.

Is there a music style that you hate and would never listen to or play?

I kind of hate the 80s traditional cliché hard rock like Bon Jovi or Poison. There are some exceptions, I like Guns N’Roses, but all this Kiss-like stuff is really poor, I don’t get any kicks from it at all. I prefer to listen to Finnish or Russian schlager than the 80s hard rock shit.

When you are writing music, do you begin with having a clear picture of what you want in your head, or do you jam, try new sounds, and then see what comes out of it?

When I compose, I usually have a vision of what I will do. I like playing around with music and playing around with styles. First I kind of get the idea, “Hey, it will be nice to do a country rap song”, for example (laughs), and then I do a country rap song. It’s kind of playing games with musical ideas. Some of them will work, some won’t work, but still it’s a nice game. I think it’s the only way to develop rock music and find new ways to move on with it. The whole rock scene is pretty much dying, and I personally think it has a lot to do with the fact that rock music can’t offer any fresh ideas to the listeners, to today’s young people, for example. They all recycle old ideas, and it’s not very exciting. I think it’s a lack of imagination.

In your personal section on the Waltari website, when you were asked to say “your message to the world”, you said, “Stop the technical progression…” At the same time, you use a lot of modern-day technology in your music. Isn’t there a contradiction?

That’s the same question when Al Gore did this big campaign about the climate changing and was using tons and tons of electricity himself. But thanks to it I became very aware of the environmental problems, these big things which came to everybody’s home, to everybody’s TV. You have to fight the war inside. If the whole nation would decide, “OK, we stop using electricity”, I wouldn’t have any problems to go on doing my music as an unplugged orchestra. But as long as we have technology, why not use it? Of course, we have a kind of vision of the good future when you can use technology in a wise way and also preserve the nature at the same time, have a good combination of technology and organic living, but I wouldn’t say that we have to do this and that. I’m more giving the mental input to the people, not being a strange preacher saying what people have to do.

We’ve read an article on Waltari on Wikipedia, and it said that the band’s biggest success was with the album “Big Bang” (1995). But after that you released many other albums, and actually we like them a lot. Doesn’t it make you a bit unhappy that your music doesn’t get the exposure it used to have and that it still deserves?

I’m not the one to think about that so much, because I’m still a lucky person who’s able to earn his living on this. I’m personally still doing OK. (laughs) Maybe the problems have been more with the labels or stuff like that, but there are so many reasons why an album won’t sell. It’s not only about music. There’s no sense to blame ourselves for that, we just must keep on going as long as we thing it’s worth going.

If you look at the street posters of this concert, you will see that Waltari is advertised as “another band of Kreator guitarist”. How would you comment on that?

(laughs) We just had a good laugh about it, because it’s the first time a thing like that has ever happened. (everybody cracks) And Sami (Yli-Sirnio, the “Kreator guitarist” in question) was the person to be the most embarrassed about it, because he’s been playing with Waltari since 1991. Yeah, we just had a good laugh about it. Maybe we will get some new audience because of that, then why not? It’s not a serious thing to us.

Many people in Russia know your album “Yeah! Yeah! Die! Die!” (1996). But not so many people know that you wrote another symphonic-metal crossover piece, “Evangelicum”…

Yeah, because it hasn’t been officially released yet.

But why?

It’s a hell of a big spectacular thing, and a lot of money is needed to make it work on CD. We tried to record the live performances, but they didn’t work out, especially because the orchestra was very young, and if you listen to their technical skills on tape, it really didn’t sound so good. It worked in a big hall, but if you start to listen to each track, it’s like, “No, you can’t put this out.”

Pekka Rahkonen (manager): Kartsy is a perfectionist!

No, not, it’s just that once we have released a CD like “Yeah! Yeah! Die! Die!” and we have to do another one, it has to be of the same quality.

But do you still plan to put it out some day?

It’s an eternal plan, and I still hope that it will come out before I die. I personally think it came out much better than “Yeah! Yeah! Die! Die!”, and it was a big success. In Helsinki we have a choir ready to come to the studio whenever we invite them. But there are still some key points missing to make it work in reality. We still live and hope that we can make it work one day. I was very proud of that stuff.

You once said in an interview that nobody in Waltari can read notes…

Maybe if I try, it will take half an hour. But I cannot do it at the usual speed.

In your opinion, would classical musical training help you when you worked with orchestra? Or on the contrary, do you think it would suppress some of the ideas you have, because you’re not that much familiar with the clichés they teach you when you get formal training?

To be honest, it’s not so black and white. After the third or fourth album of Waltari, I went to a music school for one year, because I got some voice problems, and I had to get some technical advising for my voice. At the same time, I read a bit of theory to learn some very basic things, but I never really used them in music. I learned some small things which surely helped when composing classical stuff, but I didn’t write down anything. I had this machine (points at the cassette tape recorder), and I played my keyboard, and then I gave the stuff to the orchestrator who brought it down. We had good cooperation with a famous Finnish conductor – of course, I couldn’t do it alone.

We’ve always had an impression that you are doing whatever you want with Waltari…

That’s the key point of rock music, I think!

But this year you released a solo album (“Duty Freedom”). Usually people do a solo album when they cannot realize their ideas in the main band. Does it mean that Waltari, being as diverse as it is, still has some limitations?

Yeah, I had a bit of the same reason. I have so many musical ideas in my head all the time that there is just not enough time for one band to do that all. I also have some musical ideas that don’t belong to this crossover mentality, so I wanted to try them in my solo stuff. I have many different musical sides inside me, the metal part is just 50% of my music tastes. I definitely want to try to so some different stuff as well. I’m a big fan of pop music as well. Especially 10 years ago or something like this I very much enjoyed the bands like Muse and other more pop-oriented stuff. The Beatles are one of my favorite bands.

Who are the people that play with you in your solo band? Is it a permanent line-up?

No, it’s not really permanent. If somebody’s busy when we have to do something, we have to take another guy. But I’m not a dictator, I don’t want to be a dictator even in my solo project. I always enjoy cooperation, but I let them decide themselves whether they want to or whether they have time to be in or out. I don’t force anybody to go away, but the line up has not been very permanent so far. The drummer has been the same the whole time, but guitars are already played by the people who are different that those who were on the album. (laughs) Maybe another guitarist will come to play on the next CD.

Your solo song “Running Away” had big success on the radio, and it was No. 5 in Finnish MySpace charts. But why aren’t you filming a video for it?

We didn’t do a video for it, because the success of that particular song was a big surprise. The record label had another song as the main single in their heads, and they decided to make a video for another song. On the other hand, I thought it’s good that a video song doesn’t have to be the same as the radio song. “Running Away” is a radio song and “Round The Roundabout” is the video song.

Quite a few Waltari albums have been released locally in Russia on a license. This never happened with the latest Waltari album “Below Zero” (2009) and doesn’t seem to happen with “Duty Freedom”. Do you know the reason? Was Irond Records dissatisfied with your sales, or were you dissatisfied with the label?

I don’t know anything about it. Maybe my management knows…

Pekka: It’s a many-sided story. The Finnish label Stay Heavy didn’t react on time, they offered it kind of late to Russia.

Actually I thought all the time that it’s out in Russia. It’s news to me that it’s not.

In general, how do you see the future of the music industry? When CDs are becoming outdated and people don’t want to pay for music anymore, do you think that music will soon become nothing more than a hobby for most of the musicians?

I think live performance is the thing nowadays. I didn’t do so many live shows in 10 years as I have done this year. We have been touring in Europe with Waltari, plus I have had a lot of solo tours. Of course, there are also special projects. For example, in Finland when you start a new project you can get some financial aid from the government to assist in creation of a CD. But mainly live performances are the thing.

By the way, do you have any hobbies? As long as you write music for computer games, does it mean that you are a gamer yourself?

No! Even the musician today must sit at the computer very much. All the studio work is done on the computer, and as a freelancer guy I must write many e-mails every day, and I have six different websites I must take care of and permanently watch what is happening there. It’s enough to me about computers, I don’t want to spend a single extra moment in front of the computer after all this. What I do is totally different from music and everything. I do quite much physical exercises and sports nowadays. I think it’s a very good alternative to music life: rather than to sit in the smoky backstage and to look at the computer screen, I prefer to do something different.

What kind of sports do you prefer?

I do some jogging, I swim a lot, and I do yoga. I have a kind of diverse weekly sports program. But generally my life outside music is pretty boring, there’s nothing really special to tell about. And I want it that way, because next year it will be 20 years since I became a full-time musician. The life of an artist is pretty strange, so what I need outside that must be as normal as possible to keep my mind in order. (laughs)

In 2009 you did a special show called “Waltari Plays The Cure”. Can you say a few words about it? Was The Cure a big influence on you?

We did it five or six years ago, too, this time was the second time we did it. We have these funny ideas every now and then when we have some spare time and nothing really special to do. Especially for me and Jariot (Lehtinen, guitar), the original members, The Cure was an important band when we were kids. It’s an interesting idea to put a bit of a metal aspect to their music. We respect the original songs quite much, but we play them much harder. It’s a nice project, and we have plans to do more shows like these whenever we have some free time.

Next year will see Waltari’s 20th anniversary. How are you going to celebrate it?

At least a book on Waltari will come out. At least in Finland, we haven’t started to negotiate about other countries, but I would be surprise if it’s not released in other languages, we have lots of fans in Europe, Russia and everywhere. But at least in Finland it will come out next year as a special anniversary edition. We also have plans to record something special, maybe not a real new album, but some special program.

Waltari on the Internet: http://www.waltarimusic.com/

Special thanks to Eugene Silin (Alive Concerts) and Pekka Rahkonen (Waltari management) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman Patrashov, Natalie “Snakeheart” Patrashova
Photos by Natalie “Snakeheart” Patrashova
October 15, 2010
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