the publication

Here’s a recipe for the traditional Australian campfire bread known as damper. We like to cook it here in the coals of burned-down ritual fires lit on Camera Obscura acres to celebrate various pagan festivals, and for other rites of dubious provenance. This is a cheese and chive variant, which can be done in foil in the coals, or in an iron camp oven.

Ingredients

• 2 Cups Flour
• 4 Tsp. Baking Powder (heaping)
• 1/4 teaspoon of Salt
• 1 cup grated tasty cheese (in the USA, this would be “sharp” cheese)
• 2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
• 2 tablespoons chives, chopped
• 15g (1 Tbsp.) Butter (approximately)
• 3/4 Cup Water or Beer (approximately)
• Milk

Directions

Fire off a campfire and let it die down. Sift the flour and mix in the salt and baking powder, then rub in the butter as with scones. You’re going for the consistency of bread crumbs at this point. Add in most of the cheese and chives and mix like a crazy person.

Then mix in the water or beer not overdoing it and looking ultimately for a doughy consistency. Knead lightly on a board/flat surface/altar until smooth. Form into a round shape. Wrap the dough in foil or put in a camp oven and brush with a bit of milk, then sprinkle with extra cheese. Adorn with symbols.

It’s starting to become a bit of a tedious cliché to describe all capable Finnish bands as parts of a pagan parade in a forest seemingly more mystical than a single one of us even can dream about. It seems a bit lazy to pigeonhole anyone even remotely connected to this scene as purveyors of forested free-folk-noise jams.

In the case of the densely textured, meandering soundscapes of Uton, snapshots of urban landscapes come to mind as frequently as blurry glimpses of mist-clad forest lakes and steep hillsides all draped in moss-clad rocks. If I’d transfer such a comment into sonic comparisons I’d say it’s a bit like a secret meeting between early Coil and No Neck Blues Band, if that makes any sense. Add to all this something distinctively Finnish and we got ourselves a one man band that possibly is one of the most neglected combos in the sprawling Finnish scene, but also an artist that in terms of mood and tension sounds a whole lot different than the rest of the gang.

Uton, AKA Jani Hirvonen, started doing home recordings in the early ‘00s that further down the line saw the light of the day as Taivaan Joka Kolossa, his debut CD-R for the Finnish Clay label. Due to its limited edition it appeared in another shape a year later, this time on sister label Musically Incorrect Records (MIR). Just like most of the releases on his own, now defunct Haamumaa imprint these items are incredibly difficult to get your hands on these days, so it’s nice to see at least some of them, as well as more recent Uton releases, finding their way to slightly less obscure labels such as Last Visible Dog, Jewelled Antler (the humming, shimmering noise of Ay Um Au Lam is simply fantastic), Finland’s 267 Lattajjaa and Norway’s Gold Soundz.

Such a terrible decade they were, the 80's. Bad taste has never been any worse than it was back then. Ugly clothes. Fast money. Terrible movies. Silly people with ugly haircuts. The breakthrough of MTV. Very bad music.

I did my best to ignore all that though. I dropped out of school to be a music writer because there was after all some music out there worth preaching about to the masses and I knew the name of it.

Or at least behaved as if I did.

Classes were something I attended when I needed some sleep but life's too short for sleeping when you're young. So I quit. I wrote for the local paper, and I had realized that writing about music was a great way if not to get girls, so at least to get free records, get on guest lists and get served in bars where they really shouldn't have let me in to begin with since I was too young.

I was a teenage writer with a Paisley Underground hang-up and I was 'Almost Famous'.

Anyway, one day I was sent an album by the enigmatically named Thin White Rope. (I later learnt that it was a William S. Burroughs term for ejaculation.) I had to admit that “Down in the Desert” was a really cool song, but the rest of Exploring the Axis didn't impress me that much. I didn't think of Thin White Rope as something that would steal my heart and fry my brain as some of the other bands of the era did.