Svarta Havet
svartahavet.bandcamp.com
Introduce yourself briefly, what kind of music do you make?
Joakim: Defining our style has always been very difficult with this band. We had a punk background, but when forming a new band we didn't want to approach it in terms of genre but rather just wait and see what happens. It started off bordering between emo and hardcore, but nowadays we've been going more and more in some bleak metal/post-hardcore hybrid direction. Quite free form anyway. I think my favourite description is still "dystert mörker," [laughter] bleak darkness in Swedish. Post-hardcore is an easy label, since pretty much everything goes with it. And we do have a lot of rhythm changes, so perhaps that does take us more towards post-hardcore than anything else.
Jara: How about noise rock?
Joakim: Yes, I like straightforward and repetitive stuff, so that comes from there. Noise rock kind of allows you to combine extreme rigidity with groove, and adding black metal into that is interesting because black metal is quite rigid and straightforward.
If Svarta Havet was an animal, which would it be and why?
Lotta: Well, my impression is of a hyena-like canine, but a more sophisticated one. Something that looks for fancy things in the trash. I mean, our music is a bit dirty, looking for something in all directions, but still wishing to convey a poetic message.
Joakim: A magpie would be fitting too, since they just steal the sparkly things they like from everyone! [laughter]
How did the band originally come together?
Joakim: When my previous band Svordom came to an end I wanted to keep playing this kind of heavier stuff. Markus from Svordom took on the drums, and as I had known Torre for years and had always wanted to be in a band with him I asked him to play the bass. Then Lotta heard our rehearsal tapes, and, well, you can go on from there yourself.
Lotta: I had always wanted to try screaming, and since this was a new band with no pressure, I decided to give it a try. I think it got going pretty easily from there, even if the musical style wasn't clear at all. Well, it still isn't!
Torre: Coming back to the genre question, due to the Svordom background I had some expectations that Svarta havet would be more d-beat too, but it's actually nice that we turned out something a bit different. And yeah, since there was no clear vision in the beginning, there was no pressure either. We just went to the rehearsal room and played and kept playing for a few months until Lotta came along.
Jara: How did that happen, by the way? I've heard stories that Lotta just showed up at rehearsals and surprised everyone.
Lotta: I don't know about surprising anyone, but I had looked up some vocal coaching videos on YouTube and practiced at home and immediately wanted to try it myself too. Then it just worked out well and it was fun. There are some really good tutorials on YouTube!
Joakim: You overheard me listening to our recordings at home and just were like, "Hey wouldn't this be nice."
Lotta: I really liked the music and immediately got a lot of ideas, so I wanted to come and try.
Jara: What was your band background before Svarta havet?
Lotta: Nothing like this, I had never screamed or even listened to this kind of music. When I was young I listened to mainly progressive rock and jazzy stuff and classical music. When I went to my first hardcore show, not even too many years ago in fact, a totally new world opened up to me. I realised this was my thing. After that I've only wanted to listen to and make this kind of stuff. The corporeality of the music, it's just so inspiring and magnificent when it works.
Jara: How about Torre's background?
Torre: I had listened to metal and such from a kid but I had never played this heavy music myself, so I had to readjust a bit since I was used to playing more rock-oriented stuff.
Jara: And Joakim's?
Joakim: I've been playing hardcore since the nineties, though I did have a couple of electro years in between. I'm originally from Vaasa, which had a strong straight edge scene in the turn of the millennium. When I moved to Turku it took a while to locate the right circles, but eventually I found my people through Kirjakahvila and TVO and slowly started playing in local punk and hardcore bands.
Jara: As for me, I saw you looking for a new drummer on the Punk in Finland forum after Markus had left the band. I didn't really have any active bands at the moment and no one ever asks me to join theirs, so I thought of giving it a go. I didn't know you well personally but I knew that you are all nice people, so I just replied to your ad by saying that I don't think I'm good enough but would like to try. Then Joakim send me the album you had recently finished recording, and I was like, holy shit this is good stuff. I was sure I wouldn't cut it, but then you took me in anyway.
Joakim: That's been both the biggest hardship and highlight for me personally. Having played with Markus for years, it was a very difficult situation when they had to leave the band, and finding a drummer is always the hardest, especially someone who is nice as well. Jara coming along has been an injection of inspiration, as we've had to get used to someone else's ideas, and it has challenged my own playing and, I think, also given us all some new energy.
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
What drives you to make the art that you do?
Lotta: The desire to create, of course, and the desire for change. It's a channel for all the feelings and the anger inside. Also, personally, I want to show that being a woman after 40 doesn't mean that your life is over. That's my driving force. I want to always be the rebel aunt who resists and says the wrong things.
Torre: For me, being in a band is nowadays mainly a lifeline and escape from the rat race that is life. Less saving the world, but somehow still wanting to keep up with something.
Joakim: Music has always been a both verbal and non-verbal means of expression for me. Feeling that you have little in common with the mainstream folks, music is a way to communicate some of the stuff you can't put into words. It becomes clear when you can't play for a while that you build up things you need to say, even if through a melody.
Jara: I think my reasons for doing music used to be more political, like taking part in discussions around social and environmental issues and such. I came to the punk scene in the mid-1990s. That time in the Finnish hardcore punk scene is often ridiculed and criticised for being too political, in a gatekeeping sense. Like you supposedly had to be vegan and straight edge and anarchist to be able to get gigs etc. I disagree, I don't think it was ever anything like that, and to me it just feels a bit same as with right-wing jerks nowadays complaining that "you can't say anything anymore" when people are just trying to create safer spaces and feel ok being themselves. In fact, I think that there was more pressure in the 2000s to be "unpolitically correct," probably as a reaction to veganism and both straight edge and feminism having had so much scene visibility in the previous decade. People were heckled at when they tried to have a political discussion or advertised anarchist events on the Punk in Finland forum, and punk bands with a political message were clearly in the minority. In times and scenes like that I feel it's particularly important to keep bringing political issues more to the fore and write political lyrics and take part in discussions. For me, the community around these issues is more important than what you happen to do in a given moment, whether it's playing in a band, making zines, organising events, writing articles, marching and picketing, whatever. I've played metal gigs and indie gigs, but those scenes don't really interest me at all, they give me nothing, usually. But punk gigs, I mean in the DIY political scene and in DIY political spaces, especially with queer, feminist and anarchist emphasis, have been and still are most important to me. It's really less about the music and more about building alternative infrastructure, or whatever you'd like to call it. But like I said, I used to have more drive to take part in discussions by writing lyrics, whereas nowadays it's more about just being there, being present as a gender non-conforming person with a working class background. Which I think is very important too, like Lotta said. Representation matters. Nowadays, when it's hard for me to finish anything I've started due to my OCPD and AD(H)D, it's nice to play in other people's bands as then things actually go somewhere.
Joakim: I can relate to that, coming from a political background which kind of lost its meaning. It's still not something you can leave out, it's a really big part of everything. And that's actually the reason, I mean the community, why I don't like to use the word 'metal' to describe our music; I feel no part in that scene, because DIY and organising together is the most important thing to me and my close friends are the people with whom I play and the community in which I do things.
Jara: I kind of agree, since I've found the metal scene quite repulsive, especially in Turku. But that's also the reason I think it would be important to use the label to describe our music, so that politics such as anti-fascism would find their place in metal as well. I don't mean just because of us, obviously, but when there are more bands and people vocal about certain issues, they become issues people might think about more and from different perspectives.
Joakim: It's a shame that metal has come to that. Today being unpolitical equals being indifferent to content, but that's not what it is about. I can understand wanting to make art without active political function and message, but if you don't oppose e.g. misogyny and racism in art, you're not being unpolitical – on the contrary, you are actually adhering to right-wing rhetorics, misogyny and racism.
Jara: The talk about art needing to be neutral and free from politics, "pure art," is so hypocritical exactly for this reason. An old bandmate of mine refused to listen to Catharsis (the CrimethInc. one) because they supposedly tarnish their art with anarchist politics, but at the same time it was perfectly ok to enjoy Burzum and Death in June because hey, they're just art!
Joakim: That pretty much lays bare that whole way of thinking and what's truly behind it.
Jara: And that's why it's so important that when I'm organising Love Metal Hate Fascism [an open air festival in Turku] I book actual metal bands instead of some metallic hardcore or crusty grindcore, even if the latter would more probably be anti-fascist. The metal scene is the one that hasn't yet had public critical discussion on fascism and really needs it, especially in Finland.
How do you balance between the recording process and live performing? Does either play a bigger part for the band?
Torre: Neither does, I just try to learn the songs so I could play them.
Lotta: I'm not really a rehearsal kind of person, it is difficult for me, but I have come to see how important it is to the process. But for me it's all about the live shows, they give me what I'm looking for.
Jara: Well, performing and recording are both nerve wrecking due to my OCPD, but I really like playing at rehearsals. This is actually the first band I've ever been to with regular rehearsals, so it's been nice to notice how I've even been gradually improving a bit in my playing. And I guess I haven't really been that nervous at gigs anymore either, which is weird. Still, listening to gig recordings remains as disappointing as it has always been.
Joakim: To me, rehearsals are more important than recording or playing live. That's the reason for being in bands for me, going to play with friends every week. But if I need to choose, I'd say recording. I constantly think about the next album. Every time when we play a song I think about how to make it work and whether or not it works. When you aim at making a record, you know how to play the songs live, too. That's how I see it, anyway.
Jara: I guess gigs are more important to me, because they are less strenuous than recording and because they take part in community-building in the sense we talked about earlier. Depending on the venue/space and the scene, of course. Also, to me, playing tours is an important means of travelling and seeing the world a bit, because otherwise travelling hasn't been much of an option for me due to my poor background. Getting fed is great too! Recording is nice in the sense that it leaves a more lasting mark to which you can come back later too. I've been to plenty of bands that have broken up before we've managed to get anything on tape, and that's been a bummer especially if it's been songs I've written myself. That's actually something I'm worried about now too, it has already happened so many times before.
You are originally from the Turku area. How have the surroundings shaped the sound of the band, what do you think of the scene right now?
Lotta: Oh my goodness gracious, the problem with Turku is that there are no places to play at the moment. Kirjakahvila is the only one I can think of.
Jara: There are a couple of pubs in the suburbs that have started to host gigs recently, like Pulinapubi in Raunistula and Moision Rokkari. After the main punk venue TVO was evicted a decade ago, people started organising gigs in all kinds of pubs and other spaces but they don't usually host punk gigs for long and the atmosphere is of course different to spaces run by punks.
Joakim: What I've noticed for the entire time I've been living here is that both gig and rehearsal spaces are moving further and further away from the city centre, out into the periphery. Turku is a nice place, being a vibrant and lively student city, but at the same time it's run by a right-wing city council taking down everything old and cultural and building apartments and parking lots in their place. There are almost no free spaces left, only sterile supervised places.
Lotta: The society has come to it that students don't have time to do music or pretty much anything just for fun anymore, or if they do they are too stressed out. Today there seems to be only these semi-professional types churned out by the Turku Rock Academy. Of course there's always something bubbling under, there has to be, but I just don't know where and that makes me feel so old.
Jara: Probably only in rehearsal rooms for the past couple of years. There were practically no gigs during the pandemic, so we just haven't been able to come across new bands anywhere.
Joakim: The nice thing about Turku is that since it's a student city and since it's big enough, there will always be new bands, there will always be surprises. And the people who are active in the scene are super active, most of them playing in several bands, organising gigs, doing so much. The pandemic didn't kill all motivation, there are still people who keep going.
Torre: Always the same faces in every band. [laughter]
What is going on in the Svarta Havet camp at the moment / do you have some future plans?
Joakim: Our future plan is to make the second album. We are working on the songs, rehearsing and changing everything constantly. Playing live is good for hearing the songs properly and seeing how the crowd reacts to them. Now we are in the process of testing the new album live, to see if it makes any sense. When it doesn't, it's back to the drawing board. Aside from that, I hope we could do a tour after the summer.
Jara: My plan is to keep asking labels to put out the debut album, even though you recorded it before I joined the band. It's just so good, I really want it in physical format!
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
What would you name as the biggest highlights or hardships in the band's history?
Joakim: Like I said before, for me the biggest hardship was Markus quitting the band. The cancellation of our planned tour in Greece when the pandemic struck felt bad at the time, but it turned out to be a blessing because we had so much more time to work on the record. And we got to go to Lievestuore instead. [laughter] Highlights are Jara joining the band. Making our first demo. Hearing the band play together for the first time, it was so completely weird and different!
Lotta: For me it's the first gig. I didn't really expect it to work out, but when it did I got such kicks out of it that it will never pass. I will cherish this memory forever. The biggest hardship was the pandemic, especially since for the last year I had a temporary full-time job which drained me of my will to live and ideas and energy and I was completely empty inside. I couldn't even write songs. I will never take on a full-time job again!
Torre: Coming to rehearsals is always hard, but it's usually worth it so that's a weekly highlight. But even bigger was probably finishing the album and it turning out ok. Feeling that the band breaks up after Markus left was the biggest hardship, but then when Jara joined and brought in new energy, that can be seen as a highlight, too.
Joakim: Getting a new member completely erased my fear of making the same album over again. I'm always worried about that, but now we are a different band so we can't repeat the past even if we tried.
Jara: I haven't been in the band for long, but I guess my biggest hardship was dealing with my impostor syndrome when I joined. I used to play in a doom metal band years ago, and since the metal scene is so skill and technique oriented I was always super embarrassed of my DIY punk background. That's still a huge obstacle to me in terms of actually enjoying doing music in the long run, but I guess one highlight would be having received some positive feedback on gigs. I'm always taken aback by that, it has actually been quite a long journey for me to finally be able to take compliments instead of assuming people are just making fun of me.
How do the visual aspects of the band come together and what kind of a role does it have in Svarta havet?
Jara: Oh, these are pretty good and topical questions for us, as they are something we've had to think about and discuss among ourselves recently too! Indeed, quite a lot seems to have changed if you look at the 2018 demo and the 2021 LP. I've been wondering how this journey from pretty crude punk look to fancy post-metal aesthetics, and even more recently to the algae photography of the new shirts, came about.
Joakim: Well, we've used 18th century woodcut and 19th century photography, so it's not really that far off. I guess the bottom line is clarity. I didn't want any traditional black metal aesthetics with a lot of everything going on, I wanted clear cut and graphical. I grew up with punk aesthetics, where simple black & white is all you can afford or have the means to do. That's what I love. The simpler the better.
Lotta: The letter S is so damn difficult. [laughter] We could have a great logo if only we were called "Varta havet"! The roundness of the S makes it really hard to work with.
Joakim: The debut is a theme album about earth and water, so we were looking for art and symbolism that could illustrate and support that content. The sea is in constant change, always in motion. Now we have two perfectionists in the band, so we'll see what the future holds. Like, when we did the new shirt designs with the algae graphics and logos, it was constant back and forth, vectorising the logo letters separately so they wouldn't be too thick, all kinds of stuff. But the shirts turned out good!
Jara: Not good enough.
Joakim: They are very good!
Jara: Well I suppose I'm glad someone likes them.
Lotta: Let's say they turned out ok.
Joakim: Anyway, the role of the visuals is to enforce the content of the music, for me it's not something separate.
Jara: Aesthetics are very important to me. When we put out albums with my old doom band, the other metal bands on the same label had mostly some boring digital art covers, which just didn't interest me at all. I always just skipped them because of that. Likewise, band names are super important, and I've actually missed many good bands because of them having some humorous or utterly boring name that just makes me ignore them totally. I need a meaning behind absolutely everything, some point that can be discussed, an idea, intention, something!
Joakim: I'm the same, I always spend a lot of time doing research. I'm so glad I came across Anna Atkins and their cyanotypes, which we used on the new shirts, and that whole current of feminist history of science. I really like what's behind all that, but at the same time I want the work of art to be enough in itself, instead of it needing to be explained to be enjoyed.
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
If you could collaborate with any past or present artist/band which would it be?
Torre: Veikki from Noituus.
Joakim: Jerry's Kids.
Jara: I'd like to collaborate with some future artists/bands who would be nice people and I'd get to know them and we'd have a great time. Get to know new folks and do new stuff with them.
Lotta: That's a good answer! I'd like to go to Sweden and see how we would be received there, since there aren't many Swedish-speaking bands like us. Most of them sing in English.
Jara: Oh yeah, I'd like to collaborate with the Malmö Transcore crew, the Gothenburg queer punks, and the Umeå feminist DIY punk scene. It would be great to play at their events and spaces. The Swedish scene was the one most interested, if not the only one, in releasing albums and organising gigs for my earlier hardcore bands, Species Traitor and Raivoraittius, so they have a special place in my heart.
Joakim: How about a joint answer and just say that we'd like to meet bands that are active, that do good things, and with whom we could do things.
Jara: And visit spaces that are awesome.
Joakim: Yeah let's give an answer like that instead of each of us saying something individually!
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
What were the biggest influences that made you interested in music back in the day?
Lotta: The Police was my first love.
Torre: Not playing but music in general? In that case, Alice Cooper.
Joakim: Oh, lovely!
Jara: Give us stories! How old were you?
Lotta: I was 8 or 9, I got my first walkman and ran around in the forest listening to The Police.
Torre: I came across a very worn out Hey Stoopid vinyl in the Parainen library and took it home. The usual story. I copied it on tape, it had a scratch that made it loop "your way is so damn- your way is so damn- your way is so damn-" until I pushed the needle, and that got on the tape.
Joakim: I borrowed a 1984 live VHS by Dead Kennedys from the library and watched it about a million times. That video opened my eyes and ears to the power of live performance.
Jara: My big sister listened to heavy metal and I got to go to some speed & thrash gig in the late 1980s with her. I wasn't that much into music in general back then, I just played the accordion and had some NWOBHM back patches since it was trendy. But in the early 1990s my dad, who lived in Sweden, came to visit with his current partner's kid, a teen punk with a mohawk and plenty of stories about fighting nazis on the streets of Gothenburg. He played me Bad Religion's No Control album, and I was sold.
Recommend three artists everyone should know? (bands or anything you wish to mention)
[long silence]
Jara: Such an annoying question.
Joakim: This is hard.
Jara: Lol I'll go see how I answered this question in a Species Traitor interview years ago!
[goes to Kirjakahvila's library room to browse through punk zines; meanwhile, the silence continues...]
Jara: Did you answer already?
The others: No!
Torre: No one did! Have to come up with something obscure enough. Can't just blurt out a name like Napalm Death, surely everyone knows such bands already!
Jara: But does everyone know about their anti-fascist politics?
Torre: Well, metalheads don't necessarily know about that.
Jara: So perhaps we should recommend the politics of Napalm Death to metalheads?
Joakim: Metalheads, take note!
Lotta: I say Lord Birthday, the comic artist.
Jara: And I say the anarchist scifi novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, and in particular the short story collection Birthday of the World, although before that I recommend reading the earlier books in the Hainish Cycle, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. But what else should everyone know?
[silence continues]
Jara: Google search: "best band or artist." [laughter]
Joakim: There's so much of everything, but at the moment I just have to mention Lingua Ignota. I don't think anyone has given atheism as comforting a face as they do. Already their earlier album Caligula dealt with power, abuse and sexual violence in particular, but the latest album Sinner Get Ready connects that sexual abuse with the inevitable hierarchy behind god worship. And by searching for the tip of that hierarchy, and knowing it can never be found... It's not just that there is no god, but it also brings down the entire religious hierarchy on which a lot of misogyny is actually based on. Such a comforting thought.
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Svarta Havet
svartahavet.bandcamp.com
Introduce yourself briefly, what kind of music do you make?
Joakim: Defining our style has always been very difficult with this band. We had a punk background, but when forming a new band we didn't want to approach it in terms of genre but rather just wait and see what happens. It started off bordering between emo and hardcore, but nowadays we've been going more and more in some bleak metal/post-hardcore hybrid direction. Quite free form anyway. I think my favourite description is still "dystert mörker," [laughter] bleak darkness in Swedish. Post-hardcore is an easy label, since pretty much everything goes with it. And we do have a lot of rhythm changes, so perhaps that does take us more towards post-hardcore than anything else.
Jara: How about noise rock?
Joakim: Yes, I like straightforward and repetitive stuff, so that comes from there. Noise rock kind of allows you to combine extreme rigidity with groove, and adding black metal into that is interesting because black metal is quite rigid and straightforward.
If Svarta Havet was an animal, which would it be and why?
Lotta: Well, my impression is of a hyena-like canine, but a more sophisticated one. Something that looks for fancy things in the trash. I mean, our music is a bit dirty, looking for something in all directions, but still wishing to convey a poetic message.
Joakim: A magpie would be fitting too, since they just steal the sparkly things they like from everyone! [laughter]
How did the band originally come together?
Joakim: When my previous band Svordom came to an end I wanted to keep playing this kind of heavier stuff. Markus from Svordom took on the drums, and as I had known Torre for years and had always wanted to be in a band with him I asked him to play the bass. Then Lotta heard our rehearsal tapes, and, well, you can go on from there yourself.
Lotta: I had always wanted to try screaming, and since this was a new band with no pressure, I decided to give it a try. I think it got going pretty easily from there, even if the musical style wasn't clear at all. Well, it still isn't!
Torre: Coming back to the genre question, due to the Svordom background I had some expectations that Svarta havet would be more d-beat too, but it's actually nice that we turned out something a bit different. And yeah, since there was no clear vision in the beginning, there was no pressure either. We just went to the rehearsal room and played and kept playing for a few months until Lotta came along.
Jara: How did that happen, by the way? I've heard stories that Lotta just showed up at rehearsals and surprised everyone.
Lotta: I don't know about surprising anyone, but I had looked up some vocal coaching videos on YouTube and practiced at home and immediately wanted to try it myself too. Then it just worked out well and it was fun. There are some really good tutorials on YouTube!
Joakim: You overheard me listening to our recordings at home and just were like, "Hey wouldn't this be nice."
Lotta: I really liked the music and immediately got a lot of ideas, so I wanted to come and try.
Jara: What was your band background before Svarta havet?
Lotta: Nothing like this, I had never screamed or even listened to this kind of music. When I was young I listened to mainly progressive rock and jazzy stuff and classical music. When I went to my first hardcore show, not even too many years ago in fact, a totally new world opened up to me. I realised this was my thing. After that I've only wanted to listen to and make this kind of stuff. The corporeality of the music, it's just so inspiring and magnificent when it works.
Jara: How about Torre's background?
Torre: I had listened to metal and such from a kid but I had never played this heavy music myself, so I had to readjust a bit since I was used to playing more rock-oriented stuff.
Jara: And Joakim's?
Joakim: I've been playing hardcore since the nineties, though I did have a couple of electro years in between. I'm originally from Vaasa, which had a strong straight edge scene in the turn of the millennium. When I moved to Turku it took a while to locate the right circles, but eventually I found my people through Kirjakahvila and TVO and slowly started playing in local punk and hardcore bands.
Jara: As for me, I saw you looking for a new drummer on the Punk in Finland forum after Markus had left the band. I didn't really have any active bands at the moment and no one ever asks me to join theirs, so I thought of giving it a go. I didn't know you well personally but I knew that you are all nice people, so I just replied to your ad by saying that I don't think I'm good enough but would like to try. Then Joakim send me the album you had recently finished recording, and I was like, holy shit this is good stuff. I was sure I wouldn't cut it, but then you took me in anyway.
Joakim: That's been both the biggest hardship and highlight for me personally. Having played with Markus for years, it was a very difficult situation when they had to leave the band, and finding a drummer is always the hardest, especially someone who is nice as well. Jara coming along has been an injection of inspiration, as we've had to get used to someone else's ideas, and it has challenged my own playing and, I think, also given us all some new energy.
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
What drives you to make the art that you do?
Lotta: The desire to create, of course, and the desire for change. It's a channel for all the feelings and the anger inside. Also, personally, I want to show that being a woman after 40 doesn't mean that your life is over. That's my driving force. I want to always be the rebel aunt who resists and says the wrong things.
Torre: For me, being in a band is nowadays mainly a lifeline and escape from the rat race that is life. Less saving the world, but somehow still wanting to keep up with something.
Joakim: Music has always been a both verbal and non-verbal means of expression for me. Feeling that you have little in common with the mainstream folks, music is a way to communicate some of the stuff you can't put into words. It becomes clear when you can't play for a while that you build up things you need to say, even if through a melody.
Jara: I think my reasons for doing music used to be more political, like taking part in discussions around social and environmental issues and such. I came to the punk scene in the mid-1990s. That time in the Finnish hardcore punk scene is often ridiculed and criticised for being too political, in a gatekeeping sense. Like you supposedly had to be vegan and straight edge and anarchist to be able to get gigs etc. I disagree, I don't think it was ever anything like that, and to me it just feels a bit same as with right-wing jerks nowadays complaining that "you can't say anything anymore" when people are just trying to create safer spaces and feel ok being themselves. In fact, I think that there was more pressure in the 2000s to be "unpolitically correct," probably as a reaction to veganism and both straight edge and feminism having had so much scene visibility in the previous decade. People were heckled at when they tried to have a political discussion or advertised anarchist events on the Punk in Finland forum, and punk bands with a political message were clearly in the minority. In times and scenes like that I feel it's particularly important to keep bringing political issues more to the fore and write political lyrics and take part in discussions. For me, the community around these issues is more important than what you happen to do in a given moment, whether it's playing in a band, making zines, organising events, writing articles, marching and picketing, whatever. I've played metal gigs and indie gigs, but those scenes don't really interest me at all, they give me nothing, usually. But punk gigs, I mean in the DIY political scene and in DIY political spaces, especially with queer, feminist and anarchist emphasis, have been and still are most important to me. It's really less about the music and more about building alternative infrastructure, or whatever you'd like to call it. But like I said, I used to have more drive to take part in discussions by writing lyrics, whereas nowadays it's more about just being there, being present as a gender non-conforming person with a working class background. Which I think is very important too, like Lotta said. Representation matters. Nowadays, when it's hard for me to finish anything I've started due to my OCPD and AD(H)D, it's nice to play in other people's bands as then things actually go somewhere.
Joakim: I can relate to that, coming from a political background which kind of lost its meaning. It's still not something you can leave out, it's a really big part of everything. And that's actually the reason, I mean the community, why I don't like to use the word 'metal' to describe our music; I feel no part in that scene, because DIY and organising together is the most important thing to me and my close friends are the people with whom I play and the community in which I do things.
Jara: I kind of agree, since I've found the metal scene quite repulsive, especially in Turku. But that's also the reason I think it would be important to use the label to describe our music, so that politics such as anti-fascism would find their place in metal as well. I don't mean just because of us, obviously, but when there are more bands and people vocal about certain issues, they become issues people might think about more and from different perspectives.
Joakim: It's a shame that metal has come to that. Today being unpolitical equals being indifferent to content, but that's not what it is about. I can understand wanting to make art without active political function and message, but if you don't oppose e.g. misogyny and racism in art, you're not being unpolitical – on the contrary, you are actually adhering to right-wing rhetorics, misogyny and racism.
Jara: The talk about art needing to be neutral and free from politics, "pure art," is so hypocritical exactly for this reason. An old bandmate of mine refused to listen to Catharsis (the CrimethInc. one) because they supposedly tarnish their art with anarchist politics, but at the same time it was perfectly ok to enjoy Burzum and Death in June because hey, they're just art!
Joakim: That pretty much lays bare that whole way of thinking and what's truly behind it.
Jara: And that's why it's so important that when I'm organising Love Metal Hate Fascism [an open air festival in Turku] I book actual metal bands instead of some metallic hardcore or crusty grindcore, even if the latter would more probably be anti-fascist. The metal scene is the one that hasn't yet had public critical discussion on fascism and really needs it, especially in Finland.
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
How do you balance between the recording process and live performing? Does either play a bigger part for the band?
Torre: Neither does, I just try to learn the songs so I could play them.
Lotta: I'm not really a rehearsal kind of person, it is difficult for me, but I have come to see how important it is to the process. But for me it's all about the live shows, they give me what I'm looking for.
Jara: Well, performing and recording are both nerve wrecking due to my OCPD, but I really like playing at rehearsals. This is actually the first band I've ever been to with regular rehearsals, so it's been nice to notice how I've even been gradually improving a bit in my playing. And I guess I haven't really been that nervous at gigs anymore either, which is weird. Still, listening to gig recordings remains as disappointing as it has always been.
Joakim: To me, rehearsals are more important than recording or playing live. That's the reason for being in bands for me, going to play with friends every week. But if I need to choose, I'd say recording. I constantly think about the next album. Every time when we play a song I think about how to make it work and whether or not it works. When you aim at making a record, you know how to play the songs live, too. That's how I see it, anyway.
Jara: I guess gigs are more important to me, because they are less strenuous than recording and because they take part in community-building in the sense we talked about earlier. Depending on the venue/space and the scene, of course. Also, to me, playing tours is an important means of travelling and seeing the world a bit, because otherwise travelling hasn't been much of an option for me due to my poor background. Getting fed is great too! Recording is nice in the sense that it leaves a more lasting mark to which you can come back later too. I've been to plenty of bands that have broken up before we've managed to get anything on tape, and that's been a bummer especially if it's been songs I've written myself. That's actually something I'm worried about now too, it has already happened so many times before.
You are originally from the Turku area. How have the surroundings shaped the sound of the band, what do you think of the scene right now?
Lotta: Oh my goodness gracious, the problem with Turku is that there are no places to play at the moment. Kirjakahvila is the only one I can think of.
Jara: There are a couple of pubs in the suburbs that have started to host gigs recently, like Pulinapubi in Raunistula and Moision Rokkari. After the main punk venue TVO was evicted a decade ago, people started organising gigs in all kinds of pubs and other spaces but they don't usually host punk gigs for long and the atmosphere is of course different to spaces run by punks.
Joakim: What I've noticed for the entire time I've been living here is that both gig and rehearsal spaces are moving further and further away from the city centre, out into the periphery. Turku is a nice place, being a vibrant and lively student city, but at the same time it's run by a right-wing city council taking down everything old and cultural and building apartments and parking lots in their place. There are almost no free spaces left, only sterile supervised places.
Lotta: The society has come to it that students don't have time to do music or pretty much anything just for fun anymore, or if they do they are too stressed out. Today there seems to be only these semi-professional types churned out by the Turku Rock Academy. Of course there's always something bubbling under, there has to be, but I just don't know where and that makes me feel so old.
Jara: Probably only in rehearsal rooms for the past couple of years. There were practically no gigs during the pandemic, so we just haven't been able to come across new bands anywhere.
Joakim: The nice thing about Turku is that since it's a student city and since it's big enough, there will always be new bands, there will always be surprises. And the people who are active in the scene are super active, most of them playing in several bands, organising gigs, doing so much. The pandemic didn't kill all motivation, there are still people who keep going.
Torre: Always the same faces in every band. [laughter]
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
What is going on in the Svarta Havet camp at the moment / do you have some future plans?
Joakim: Our future plan is to make the second album. We are working on the songs, rehearsing and changing everything constantly. Playing live is good for hearing the songs properly and seeing how the crowd reacts to them. Now we are in the process of testing the new album live, to see if it makes any sense. When it doesn't, it's back to the drawing board. Aside from that, I hope we could do a tour after the summer.
Jara: My plan is to keep asking labels to put out the debut album, even though you recorded it before I joined the band. It's just so good, I really want it in physical format!
What would you name as the biggest highlights or hardships in the band's history?
Joakim: Like I said before, for me the biggest hardship was Markus quitting the band. The cancellation of our planned tour in Greece when the pandemic struck felt bad at the time, but it turned out to be a blessing because we had so much more time to work on the record. And we got to go to Lievestuore instead. [laughter] Highlights are Jara joining the band. Making our first demo. Hearing the band play together for the first time, it was so completely weird and different!
Lotta: For me it's the first gig. I didn't really expect it to work out, but when it did I got such kicks out of it that it will never pass. I will cherish this memory forever. The biggest hardship was the pandemic, especially since for the last year I had a temporary full-time job which drained me of my will to live and ideas and energy and I was completely empty inside. I couldn't even write songs. I will never take on a full-time job again!
Torre: Coming to rehearsals is always hard, but it's usually worth it so that's a weekly highlight. But even bigger was probably finishing the album and it turning out ok. Feeling that the band breaks up after Markus left was the biggest hardship, but then when Jara joined and brought in new energy, that can be seen as a highlight, too.
Joakim: Getting a new member completely erased my fear of making the same album over again. I'm always worried about that, but now we are a different band so we can't repeat the past even if we tried.
Jara: I haven't been in the band for long, but I guess my biggest hardship was dealing with my impostor syndrome when I joined. I used to play in a doom metal band years ago, and since the metal scene is so skill and technique oriented I was always super embarrassed of my DIY punk background. That's still a huge obstacle to me in terms of actually enjoying doing music in the long run, but I guess one highlight would be having received some positive feedback on gigs. I'm always taken aback by that, it has actually been quite a long journey for me to finally be able to take compliments instead of assuming people are just making fun of me.
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
How do the visual aspects of the band come together and what kind of a role does it have in Svarta Havet?
Jara: Oh, these are pretty good and topical questions for us, as they are something we've had to think about and discuss among ourselves recently too! Indeed, quite a lot seems to have changed if you look at the 2018 demo and the 2021 LP. I've been wondering how this journey from pretty crude punk look to fancy post-metal aesthetics, and even more recently to the algae photography of the new shirts, came about.
Joakim: Well, we've used 18th century woodcut and 19th century photography, so it's not really that far off. I guess the bottom line is clarity. I didn't want any traditional black metal aesthetics with a lot of everything going on, I wanted clear cut and graphical. I grew up with punk aesthetics, where simple black & white is all you can afford or have the means to do. That's what I love. The simpler the better.
Lotta: The letter S is so damn difficult. [laughter] We could have a great logo if only we were called "Varta havet"! The roundness of the S makes it really hard to work with.
Joakim: The debut is a theme album about earth and water, so we were looking for art and symbolism that could illustrate and support that content. The sea is in constant change, always in motion. Now we have two perfectionists in the band, so we'll see what the future holds. Like, when we did the new shirt designs with the algae graphics and logos, it was constant back and forth, vectorising the logo letters separately so they wouldn't be too thick, all kinds of stuff. But the shirts turned out good!
Jara: Not good enough.
Joakim: They are very good!
Jara: Well I suppose I'm glad someone likes them.
Lotta: Let's say they turned out ok.
Joakim: Anyway, the role of the visuals is to enforce the content of the music, for me it's not something separate.
Jara: Aesthetics are very important to me. When we put out albums with my old doom band, the other metal bands on the same label had mostly some boring digital art covers, which just didn't interest me at all. I always just skipped them because of that. Likewise, band names are super important, and I've actually missed many good bands because of them having some humorous or utterly boring name that just makes me ignore them totally. I need a meaning behind absolutely everything, some point that can be discussed, an idea, intention, something!
Joakim: I'm the same, I always spend a lot of time doing research. I'm so glad I came across Anna Atkins and their cyanotypes, which we used on the new shirts, and that whole current of feminist history of science. I really like what's behind all that, but at the same time I want the work of art to be enough in itself, instead of it needing to be explained to be enjoyed.
If you could collaborate with any past or present artist/band which would it be?
Torre: Veikki from Noituus.
Joakim: Jerry's Kids.
Jara: I'd like to collaborate with some future artists/bands who would be nice people and I'd get to know them and we'd have a great time. Get to know new folks and do new stuff with them.
Lotta: That's a good answer! I'd like to go to Sweden and see how we would be received there, since there aren't many Swedish-speaking bands like us. Most of them sing in English.
Jara: Oh yeah, I'd like to collaborate with the Malmö Transcore crew, the Gothenburg queer punks, and the Umeå feminist DIY punk scene. It would be great to play at their events and spaces. The Swedish scene was the one most interested, if not the only one, in releasing albums and organising gigs for my earlier hardcore bands, Species Traitor and Raivoraittius, so they have a special place in my heart.
Joakim: How about a joint answer and just say that we'd like to meet bands that are active, that do good things, and with whom we could do things.
Jara: And visit spaces that are awesome.
Joakim: Yeah let's give an answer like that instead of each of us saying something individually!
SVARTA HAVET LIVE AT UTOPIA, Turku, 2022.
What were the biggest influences that made you interested in music back in the day?
Lotta: The Police was my first love.
Torre: Not playing but music in general? In that case, Alice Cooper.
Joakim: Oh, lovely!
Jara: Give us stories! How old were you?
Lotta: I was 8 or 9, I got my first walkman and ran around in the forest listening to The Police.
Torre: I came across a very worn out Hey Stoopid vinyl in the Parainen library and took it home. The usual story. I copied it on tape, it had a scratch that made it loop "your way is so damn- your way is so damn- your way is so damn-" until I pushed the needle, and that got on the tape.
Joakim: I borrowed a 1984 live VHS by Dead Kennedys from the library and watched it about a million times. That video opened my eyes and ears to the power of live performance.
Jara: My big sister listened to heavy metal and I got to go to some speed & thrash gig in the late 1980s with her. I wasn't that much into music in general back then, I just played the accordion and had some NWOBHM back patches since it was trendy. But in the early 1990s my dad, who lived in Sweden, came to visit with his current partner's kid, a teen punk with a mohawk and plenty of stories about fighting nazis on the streets of Gothenburg. He played me Bad Religion's No Control album, and I was sold.
Recommend three artists everyone should know? (bands or anything you wish to mention)
[long silence]
Jara: Such an annoying question.
Joakim: This is hard.
Jara: Lol I'll go see how I answered this question in a Species Traitor interview years ago!
[goes to Kirjakahvila's library room to browse through punk zines; meanwhile, the silence continues...]
Jara: Did you answer already?
The others: No!
Torre: No one did! Have to come up with something obscure enough. Can't just blurt out a name like Napalm Death, surely everyone knows such bands already!
Jara: But does everyone know about their anti-fascist politics?
Torre: Well, metalheads don't necessarily know about that.
Jara: So perhaps we should recommend the politics of Napalm Death to metalheads?
Joakim: Metalheads, take note!
Lotta: I say Lord Birthday, the comic artist.
Jara: And I say the anarchist scifi novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, and in particular the short story collection Birthday of the World, although before that I recommend reading the earlier books in the Hainish Cycle, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. But what else should everyone know?
[silence continues]
Jara: Google search: "best band or artist." [laughter]
Joakim: There's so much of everything, but at the moment I just have to mention Lingua Ignota. I don't think anyone has given atheism as comforting a face as they do. Already their earlier album Caligula dealt with power, abuse and sexual violence in particular, but the latest album Sinner Get Ready connects that sexual abuse with the inevitable hierarchy behind god worship. And by searching for the tip of that hierarchy, and knowing it can never be found... It's not just that there is no god, but it also brings down the entire religious hierarchy on which a lot of misogyny is actually based on. Such a comforting thought.
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