Elektropol was caught to an interview with some explanatory questions. Check it out!
You are publishing an ambient-oriented debut album
after working for many years with it. What does this album mean to you?
It means a
lot. In principle the album includes stories from a trip 27 years long this
far. These stories remind me about some stages of life every time I hear them.
The album
is a sort of a diary or more like an yearbook about my life this far. There has
been many adventures but the release of this album has been uncertain. The
completion of the album is kind of a milestone for myself. When you work
hard it gives results.
 |
| Mr. Elektropol, Jani Wahlman |
The first track of the album was originally
done over six years ago. How this is seen in the album and why it has taken
this much time?
It is true
that the first track of the album was formed already in 2005, but it has been kind
of refurbished along the way of my evolution as an artist. I want to refine
these things quite a lot before presentation. But perfection is a paradox.
There were
also times I was afraid that my skills were not enough for publishing my own
compositions. In addition during the studies in the Tampere University of
Applied Sciences time was very scarce resource and I had to put something
aside.
You were recently in a serious accident. Did
this affect someway to your album?
My album
project has had an unofficial name “kicked bastard” meaning that the project
was kicked forwards whenever I had enough resources.
My accident
made me understand that you never know what might happen to you and when the
ability of executing your dreams is taken way.
The
accident has affected to a lot of things and to my thoughts. For this “bastard”
it certainly gave a kick.
Do you want to explain the name of the album,
The Phoenix?
The Phoenix
tells a lot about my personal life philosophy, about something that lies
beneath all that I represent.
A man lives
physically just once, but can spiritually die and be reborn many times during
that physical lifetime, like a phoenix bird.
One should
always dare to challenge his own beliefs and to continuously develop the vision
about the world and the life.
As a whole,
my album tells a story about The Phoenix to be born and to die, having one
miraculous flight in between.
How would you describe the sounds that this
album will include?
I don’t
want to limit my style in a way or another. The idea is that in my music I just
use sounds that are relevant to the story. There is a lot of clean and
distorted piano sound, synths, guitars, vocoders and vocal samples.
Each
composition has its own atmosphere. Those atmospheres range from dark to hopeful
and from peaceful to somewhat energetic. But each composition has a touch of
hope in it.
What are your influences?
I think
that there are millions of them, not limited to musical acts, but couple of those
musical ones include AIR, Giant Robot, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, Yellow Magic
Orchestra, Denki Groove, Future Sound of London, Morcheeba, Moloko and Björn
Olsson.
I have to
say that my brother is also one musical genius having a talent that always
amazes me.
How can one listen to your album when it’s
released?
It is
released through the internet for free. Probably we will use services such as
Mikseri.net (in Finnish) and MySpace. Videos become available to Vimeo. You can
already watch some Arcade Goodies from there.
Is there coming out music also in the future?
At the
moment I have probably eleven albums in three separate projects planned. So I
think The Phoenix won’t be the first and the last album of the Elektropol at
the same time.
At the end of the interview, would you like to
thank someone about this project?
First and
foremost I want to give thanks to the Life and of course all the friends that
have contributed to it. Friends are the one of the most important things in
life.
Text and photo: Isabell Vanhatalo
Translation: Electric Manor
