KAUKOLAMPI
Leader of Finns K-X-P drops his dense, synth-driven solo album.
Best known as the frontman and driving force behind Helsinki’s premier electronic space cadets K-X-P, Timo Kaukolampi has spent a great deal of time pummelling people into a state of euphoric submission with a relentless and trippy percussive assault. As a result, the Finn’s first bona fide solo venture comes as a pleasant surprise. Simply titled 1, its evocative electronic soundscapes delve deep into the atmospheric potential of old school synthesisers, proudly tipping a hat to pioneers like Vangelis and Klaus Schulze along the way. For Kaukolampi, this shift of focus originally stemmed from practical rather than creative concerns.
“I was living in Berlin between 2012 and 2015 and when I moved there, I rented out my studio space in Helsinki because I didn’t need it any more,” he explains. “When I came back, I realised I had a lot of equipment that was broken, all kinds of synthesisers and drum machines. I found a good guy who’s brilliant at fixing them, and I started taking everything to him for maintenance, to bring it all back to life. At the beginning of 2016 I started to make these recordings without any kind of aim. I just started learning how to make electronic music again. From those jam sessions, which could be anything from 10 minutes to one hour long, some kind of album started to form.”
Inspired to fire up his impressive collection of synths, Kaukolampi spent much of 2016 working on the new material. As the music evolved, he found himself drifting further from K-X-P’s beat-driven approach and deeper into the world of ambience and abstraction. At certain points, he specifically removed beats from certain tracks, increasingly convinced that the true magic of this music lay in its non-linear allure.
“I realised that I listen to a lot of music at home that doesn’t have any beats – lots of very abstract modern classical and free jazz and experimental music with electronics, lots of ambient and drone,” he says. “My own taste has been changing a lot. K-X-P has really intense drumming all the time, so maybe subconsciously I wanted a different focus, because the drumming sometimes gets overwhelming!
“Another thing that was really a big influence: last spring I did four months of radio shows at Radio Helsinki, where I made this rule that I wanted to play music that didn’t have any beats. So this ambient drone show was on air every Sunday and I grew closer to music that’s flowing and that gave me the freedom to leave lots of beats out.”
Beyond his obvious love for experimenting in the studio, Kaukolampi’s first album has also given him an opportunity to pay tribute to some of his greatest inspirations. Opening track The Prodigal Son Of Magnesia references the region of Greece where Vangelis was born, while the twinkling, ambient haze of Epiphyte (Requiem For Mika) is a heartfelt tribute to Mika Vainio from revered Finnish electronic renegades Pan Sonic. Vainio passed away in 2017 aged only 53, but Kaukolampi is proud to be keeping his fearless spirit alive.
“I do a lot of yoga and I’ve learned that you have to respect your teachers. Mika was definitely one of the teachers for me,” he says. “In the late 90s it was people like Pan Sonic who proved you could do something abstract, raw and wild, and people would like it outside of Finland. That was great encouragement for people like me, making strange electronic music. Mika was an amazing artist, a great friend and a very big influence. He had the same equipment I had but he made these amazing sounds out of it. I don’t know how he did it… but one day I will find out!” DL
“I JUST STARTED LEARNING HOW TO MAKE ELECTRONIC MUSIC AGAIN.”