Svart Finland Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Nature documentary series The Living Planet very much captured the imagination of Raoul Bjorkenheim back in 1986. It featured erupting volcanoes and plumes of molten lava and some of that drama and energy is captured in this fine jazz album which now gets a new extended reissue. Bjorkenheim studied at the Helsinki Conservatory for a year and the Berklee College of Music in Boston for three years and worked with composer and drummer Edward 'Eetu' Vesala. For this album, he played with reed virtuosos Jorma Tapio and Tapani Rinne, bassist Sampo Lassila and drummers Michel Lambert and Heikki 'Lefty' Lehto. It is a hot and raw record that contains an album's worth of previously unheard material.

Review: Dutch gothic doom metal turned shoegazing prog collective The Gathering are one of those artists of two consequential halves. Superheat; their live album released at the dawn of the new millennium and recorded primarily in the classic Amsterdam Paradiso, sonically deposits the group half a year before the release of their seminal sixth full-length If Then Else, by which time they had made the full transition to alternative auteurs. Here the material is a complimentary myriad of cuts from their acclaimed opus How to Measure A Planet?, interspliced with material from their darker, heftier albums such as Mandylion and Nighttime Birds.

Review: .

Review: Mikko Mattlar, a walking encyclopaedia of Finnish electronic music, has been responsible for some killer compilations over the years, but 'Black Hole', his latest collection, may be the best yet. It focuses on exceedingly obscure 'culth synth disco music' produced in his home country between 1979 and '91 - mostly in the early-to-mid-80s - with every track either being an unreleased oddity of a genuinely uber-rare private press record. It's both eye-opening and extremely entertaining, with the included tracks doffing a cap to heavy disco-funk, underground gospel disco, bedroom-made late '80s synth-disco and quirky Scandinavian electrofunk.