Although Korpituli had already put out some good quality releases, it was with the recently released ‘Pohjola’ that things got really interesting. Whereas the first two albums consisted of fairly well-executed, but perhaps a bit on the safe side Melodic Black Metal, this latest work sees the band pulling out all the stops and what’s more, they are taking a completely different musical direction. ‘Pohjola’ is a full-on mid-90’s-inspired Pagan Black Metal record with a soulful and authentic feel. This alone was enough reason to throw a few questions at the man behind Korpituli (who bears the same name), but the deeper meaning behind the album makes the Q&A even more interesting…
Hi Korpituli, thanks for accepting my interview request and welcome to The Whispering Darkness. I understood that you had a specific goal with this album, musically, can you please take us with you on this mindset? What exactly did you want to achieve with this album?
Hi and thank for having me. I worked on Pohjola for a few years slowly but steadily as some kind of a passion project for Finnish / Nordic folk music, four of the tracks are based on old folk songs where I’ve taken the old melodies and songs and expanded them to the realm of melodic folky black metal a bit in the vein Storm did with their groundbreaking album Nordavind. I was planning to release this originally through Iku-Turso as a continuation of our ‘Storm Over Isengard’ EP but doing a 100% Finnish sung album with a Dutch singer didn’t make any sense and also the other band members didn’t feel as strongly about this direction I wanted to take so I decided to utilize my one-man-band at that time to finalize this vision and eventually ended up asking S.Redeemer to join me as a permanent drummer since there is only so much I can do on them drums myself where as I’ve yet to find the limits to his skills.
My Pohjola is a cold and harsh place, the people are serious, honest and straightforward with big hearts and this is the side of us I wanted to portray with this album. I draw inspiration from the Finnish folklore and pagan mythology and from Classic Nordic Folk / Pagan Black Metal bands such as Storm and Isengard with minor nods into our countrymen in Moonsorrow and Finntroll and from these ingredients the Pohjola of Korpituli was born.
The album is split into two logical chapters:
Part I: Pohjoisen Kansan Taruja (Tales of Our Northern People)
Part II: Suomalaista Sielunmaisemaa (Finnish Soulscape / Landscape of the Finnish Soul)
The first half of the album concentrates on the mythology side of things from the point of view of the Pohjola folk rather than the usual Kalevala perspective, inspired by selected old poems and rhymes from the “Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot” database. We hear of Pohjan Akka – Louhi,the Queen of the North, her fierce wrath on the theft of the mythical Sampo device, about the famous feasts of the North where men travelled from afar to woo on the beautifull maidens of Pohjola and we pay tribute to our national hero Lalli and his justified slaying of the Bishop Henrik at the ice of the frozen lake Köyliö as highlighted on the cover art of the album.
The basis for the latter half of the album comes from old Finnish folk songs rearranged and extended with original material for the context of melodic Nordic Pagan Black Metal. Sorrow, stubborness, sauna, nature and the sacred importance of all these things to us gives insight into the nature of our northern people, a window into our minds and thoughts, how we are and how we behave.
This album has been made with love for the ways of the days gone, our past and our present and I’m uttely delighted to share this journey with you.
‘Pohjola’ pleasantly surprised me. To me, was not only totally different from what you had done before, but to me it was mostly a refreshing piece of work that reminded me of some classic 90’s records that defined the Folk/Pagan-like Black Metal genre. What does the genre mean you personally?
Thank you, it was a quite drastic turn music-wise after the first two albums yet I feel the inspiration and ideas stem from the same roots of Nordic Black Metal tradition and our pagan roots. Storm and Isengard were and still are some of my alltime favourite bands, those melodies – odes to nature – with a somewhat melancholic twist combined to a somewhat organic soundscapes and drunken sailor vocals is hardwired to my DNA. Also as a somewhat middle-age crisis I’ve delved deeper to my roots to gain some knowledge as to where I come from and why am I this way? I’ve come to discover a lot of new stuff from our past and present and eventually it has grown on to become a part of my identity as well.
However I have to say the more popular approach of folk metal that followed after that never really did anything for me, the atmosphere tends to be too jolly and entertainment-driven where as my Pohjola is a dark and serious place where people are straightforward and honest yet with warm passionate hearts.
I can imagine that, compared to your previous records, the creative process for ‘Pohjola’ was quite different. Can you share something about the creative process that went behind forging this latest record?
I guess the first spark came from listening to this folk songs “Yksi, Kaksi, Kolme, Neljä” by Merja Soria on youtube that left me mesmerized and as I sung along with it I started getting ideas and inspiration to try this out with the means that I have at my disposal and see what would come of it. I might have spinned some Storm around the same time and decided that perhaps it is time to do something similar from Finnish folk songs and suddenly riffs started appearing and I started going through my childhood classics for further inspiration and decided it’s time to do another EP of this sorts which eventually expanded into an album.
If I am correct, the previous two records were more or less built upon the same sort of themes, but ‘Pohjola’ seems to be a mostly a conceptual record that tells the story of a national hero who killed a bishop. What made you choose for this specific topic for this album? And what do local/national folklore and cultural heritage mean to you?
Growing up on the Finnish countryside I have always had a close personal connection to nature, it was always there next to us and with Korpituli I wanted to explore that connection and the magical secrets the forest and our realm holds which has been the red string across those albums and I think this is not that far away from that theme and source but has taken a more people, ancestors and the ways of the old oral tradition kind of perspective into things.
Which brings us to Lalli, the hero of the pagan ways of old and a symbol of sovereignty, the primal Finn, triumphant within the eye of the crusades of the crooked church. That story might not be true and was to my knowledge invented by the church to create a saint on the Finnish shores upon their unlawful arrival to our lands but I wanted to turn that against them, to glorify the protagonist who was wronged by the churchmen and did the right thing, what any of us would do, by punishing the bishop for his ill-deeds. Some might think we’d gullible due to our generous nature but that is not the case.
Also upon reading the old-Kalevala, the first iteration of our national epic, I found myself identifying more on the side of the Pohjola folk rather than the band of Kalevala misfits from the south who go to Pohjola with eventually ill-intentions and end up stealing the mythical Sampo device so I wanted to switch the perspective of the age-old stories to the Pohjola side of things, why the fierce wrath of Louhi the great witch of the North was cast upon the Kalevala people.
Picking up on the previous question a little, for this record you have also used a few original texts from the ‘Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot’, a voluminous work that formed the basis of the Kalevale as well as some traditional Finnish folk songs. I can imagine that was quite a challenge. Can you tell something about the way you have woven all these things into the final work that became ‘Pohjola’?
That is a great source of oral tradition available for any one of us although collected on a very christianized time period and thus biased in some ways but nevertheless a great source of almost lost wisdom and understanding how we used to view the world. My ways of working are quite intuitive, when the urge drives me somewhere I tend to follow it and let it take me where it wants to go, almost like channelling something primal that wants to be heard and I am in just for the ride.
At the end of the day I am a storyteller of what I feel to be right and authentic and on my books deserves to be told. With the folk songs as a starting point that gave me a good starting point to delve deeper, land and expand and from that state of being my own riffs started to emerge and they all had a certain emotion or feeling associated to them from which I took some keywords and went into SKVR to see if there was spells and poems associated to those terms and if it felt right I used it and slowly the songs and texts started taking shape and form and eventually the epic of the Pohjola of Korpituli emerged.
These days a lot of different terms are commonly used to describe the music you created for ‘Pohjola’. Whether it are objectives like Pagan, Folk or even Viking that are added to the Black Metal genre. Do these terms and adjectives mean anything to you?
Well of course, we always have a need to describe or label things which is only natural, to me Pohjola is something indigenous, it is authentic, it is natural or what feels right, it is an homage to times gone and an anchor to hold me in place if the tides get rough. It is Pagan more than one way, it stems from folklore and although there might have been Finnish Vikings as well I wouldn’t label my works as anything Viking. A Viking was someone who went on expeditions, usually abroad, usually by sea, and usually in a group with other Vikings where as I’m more of a stay at my homeland kinda guy.
I am always interested in how things work for one-man bands. Since you are also in a few bands with other musicians: what, to you, is the main difference in creating music as a collective opposed to doing everything on your own like you are doing in Korpituli?
Well I tend to be the driving motor in most of my projects, the one with the vision and others are there with me to finetune that vision into something more than just me so it’s not that different for me when I’m working with others or on my own. I am usually very satisfied with the contribution of my bandmates, the thing they add to my vision but also they offer me a reflection into whether things make sense or if something is not working which I miss when working all on my own.
With Korpituli I think I needed to prove myself that I can do it all on my own, and for a couple of albums I did exactly that but the point is proven and I wasn’t doing any justice to the songs by trying to drum them myself so it was a logical choice to ask someone to join me who is much more proficient in the practice. I think a one-man-band is also a good way to vent out some steam, indulge in the creative flow and get things done efficiently and in a timely manner, you don’t have to ask anyone for permission for anything, a free sovereign spirit.
Continuing a bit on the previous question, as mentioned above, you are also active in a quite a few other bands, but as far as I was able to see, most of them, except for Iku-Turso, are not super active (anymore). How do you work, creatively? Do you come up with a riff and think about to what band or project it fits best or do you start writing with a specific purpose in mind? And do these different bands mean to you?
There is some overlap in style between Korpituli and Iku-Turso but besides those I think all the bands I’ve been involved in had a pretty different sound and feel to them. I think they all somehow reflect my personal journey at the time of their birth and where my interests have wondered at the time, riding the waves of creativity and again intuitively engaging in different projects that I felt a sort of a compulsion to partake in. I used to play a lot of guitar, just picked it up and played for a couple of hours and recorded all the decent riffs that would come out of it which I can use in the future if something specific is needed on a project.
Currently Iku-Turso, Korpituli and Alkuharmonian Kantaja are all on my spotlight and I’m working on new material, might do some new Nachtvrucht as well if I have time and I’ve had some new Khanus material sitting by waiting to be finalised but ever since I started Korpituli Productions I’ve had less time to work on my music and I think I might have to turn that around and invest myself more creatively in the art itself as that at the end of the day is the most rewarding aspect of the whole game to me.
Is there a certain vision, musically and ideologically/spiritually, that holds together your various bands and the label that you run?
Well not specifically, if I hear something great from my friends or colleagues I usually ask if they’d be interested in doing a cassette release of their work so there is my personal preference of course, some of my releases are from my past where I’ve really enjoyed something and would like to offer that to a bit wider audience of today and then there’s my own projects which all are a piece of who and what I am and each one offer a different perspective into my world.
Zooming out a little. As an insider that has already been active in the Finnish Black Metal scene for about a quarter of a century, how do you look upon your native Black Metal scene? It gets a lot of praise from all places of the world, but how do you experience the scene yourself and did this change over the course of the last twenty-plus years?
Well I wasn’t very involved in for the first decade or two, I felt the local scene and whatnot was very competitive and everyone just wanted to prove themselves with their music and thus I didn’t much rely on anyone else outside my bands. That all changed somewhere along the way as I started new bands and projects and really put myself out there engaging with other creative minds and eventually started contributing more to the scene myself and getting involved in things.
It is a colourfull scene with a lot of talent, devotion and passion for the dark arts, people take these things seriously most of the time and I think we’ve finally as a collective whole gotten out of the melancholic nature of ourselves and taking pride in our achievements and those of our peers, the Finnish Black Metal scene is getting praised but it’s all right, we can take it.
And, the obvious question to, from my side, round things off a little: what else can we expect from your side in the upcoming months? Is there something cooking when it comes to your other bands and label too?
We have a new EP with Iku-Turso almost ready and hope to get that out this fall when we enter for a small Finnish tour with some Norwegian colleagues. Also we did an Emperor cover both with Iku-Turso and Korpituli for a tribute compilation coming out through the A Fine Day to Die label, part 1 is already available from them and these will be included on the 2nd part of the compilation. I will probably release one or both of them on my 3rd anniversary of Korpituli Productions 20.7.2024.
We have a fantastic split almost ready with Alkuharmonian Kantaja that we also hope to get out this fall, just finishing the mix on that one and let’s see when the other party gets their material ready.
I am also hoping to a more dungeon synth kind of release with Korpituli but that is a bit out of my comfort zone so it might take a bit longer to materialize properly and I have about half of the songs for the next Korpituli album underway which stylistically will be closer to the first two albums than Pohjola.
As for Korpituli Productions I will close the third year of activity by releasing a fancy screenprinted Cassette Box of the new Curse Upon Prayer album, a re-issue of the Beleth’s Trumpet demo that sold-out quite fast from me and a re-issue of a late 90’s demo from some of my mates that deserve some additional attention to their material.
Besides that my calendar is pretty wide open but I hope to get more focus time on creating new interesting releases for my own bands.
Alright, Korpituli, thanks a lot for your time and giving us a glimpse of what’s inside your world. I’d like to give you the opportunity to close off the interview with some last words of your own…
It was a pleasure, thank you for putting good effort into the questions and the best of luck with your endeavours – With Strength I Burn.
S.Korpituli
