The deceptive darkness of blue-eyed Kiki

The deceptive darkness of blue-eyed Kiki

5 June, 2009 | 10.46AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: bpitch control, kiki

Joakim Ijäs is a liar. His soft voice, nervous laugh, mild manners, fair complexion, and clean style is just a trick. Don’t believe the polite nice boy from Finland act. If you go and see him play in a club you will only find a techno doom monger. Kiki might sound like a cute hamster, but there is nothing except dark skies in his blue eyes.

Ijäs has a good excuse for the blackness that surrounds him (and his MySpace). “Finland is such a dark and depressing place. The Finnish are known for being depressed. It’s one of the only countries in the world where tracks in a minor chord top the charts,” he says, in his punctuated English.

Kiki moved to Berlin from Helsinki in 1994 to study architecture and design. “I probably moved from Finland to escape the darkness,” he jokes. “But it is true that dark music tends to come from dark places. There are only three countries in the world where minor tracks top the charts - Argentina, Japan and Finland - and all of them have a huge tango scene. Tango is usually in a minor chord. Also Japan and Finland have some of the highest suicide rates in the world.”

Kiki’s new album ‘Kaiku’ plays like a tale of sorrow in monochrome. Contrastingly, his debut album ‘Run With Me’ released five years ago is like a vivid rainbow in technicolor.

Ijäs explains, “I’ve grown up as a musician. When ‘Run With Me’ was made, I was perhaps a little more focused on making fun dance music. With this album, I wanted to create something timeless. ‘Run With Me’ probably sounds a little dated. Like if you listen to ‘The End of the World’ now [a hit track from his debut LP] it probably sounds a bit cheesy.”

I didn’t produce the whole of ‘Kaiku’ with visuals in mind, but I did want the album to flow like a film.

Part of Ijäs’ transformation comes from his fascination for film. Since being involved in a friend’s film project two years ago, he “started to think about music visually. I was asked to write a track to accompany a very dramatic scene, and it was a completely new way of working. I started to see music, to think of how it might represent a particular mood or action.

“I didn’t produce the whole of ‘Kaiku’ with visuals in mind, but I did want the album to flow like a film so it begins with the dramatic ‘Autumn Leaves’ which is my representation of a stormy night. The track that follows is like the calm after the storm. The album continues in this manner and it really has to be heard in its entirety to fully understand my vision.”

Live is better

Kiki’s studio has changed a huge amount since his debut ‘Run With Me’, which was created solely on a computer. ‘Kaiku’ was written mainly using analogue gear, live instruments, and vocalists. “Electronic dance music has always been a body experience for me, so I’ve always recorded music by jamming out in the studio. Most of ‘Kaiku’ was recorded as very long studio sessions. I always prefer to work this way. I like to just start jamming and hit record. I leave the mistakes in. I played all the keyboards on my album, and had a few guest musicians and vocalists contribute.”

Kiki’s live approach to making music translates perfectly as a live show in clubs. Armed with keyboards and drum machines, his live sets have a wild, improvisational feel. “I approach my live sets like a jazz musician. I begin my sets with absolutely no plan. I just begin playing and see where it takes me,” says Ijäs.

“I’ve been getting better and better at it during the tour for this album. I try to recreate the feelings that I had at the time of the recordings. I don’t want to be a robot DJ who just uses a laptop to perform live. I hope because I play keyboards and do things truly live I stand out.”

Sometimes Kiki’s impromptu live performances turn out so good that he ends up re-recording them in the studio. “Like for my remix of ‘Good Vodoo’ - I actually did that live in a club one night and thought it sounded so good it should be the official remix.”

Coincidence or the Berlin factor?

When I go back to Finland to play I actually feel like a tourist now. All my friends are talking about these new restaurants and bars and I don’t know what they’re talking about.

Kiki’s LP is a curious tale of fortunate coincidences. Some might call it fate. Ijäs called it ‘echo’, which is what ‘Kaiku’ means in Finnish. “Every time I wished for something, like a vocalist or a cello player, within a couple of days something happened that gave me exactly what I wanted. I thought of something, and the echo appeared a few days later,” he says.

For instance, Kiki longed for a cellist. A day later, he bumped into an old friend in the street whose wife happened to be a professional cellist. When he yearned for a male vocalist, an acquaintance by the name of Jake The Rapper called him with a vocal idea. In Italy at a festival, he saw a band called Pirica perform and was blown away by the female singer. He meant to talk to them, but never had the time. A few days later on Myspace, there was a message from Pirica awaiting him.

It could all just be the Berlin factor, of course. Chela Simone, who sang on ‘Good Vodoo’, happened to pop into Jay Haze’s Berlin studio as Kiki was mixing down the track. “She asked if she could sing over the song because she liked the sound of it, and we said, ‘err...sure.’ It turned out perfect.”

Seth Troxler’s remix came about after Kiki bumped into the Detroit-born producer in a Berlin street. The chance meeting with the husband of the cellist happened in Berlin too. Jake The Rapper? Berlin. “That’s the way Berlin is. You always bump into people in the street,” says Ijäs, who now has a German passport as well as a Finnish one. “When I go back to Finland to play I actually feel like a tourist now. All my friends are talking about these new restaurants and bars and I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Club bangers

One of the most club friendly cuts on ‘Kaiku’ is the menacing ‘Mogadishu’ that drives forwards with radioactive bass, warped vocals, and threatening FX.

Kiki recorded the track after reading about a plane hijack that occurred over 20 years ago. “These terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a Lufthansa flight and flew it all over the world before eventually landing in Mogadishu. They demanded that several terrorists from the RAF [Red Army Faction] group be released. Eventually the plane was stormed by anti-terrorist police in Mogadishu and the hostages were freed. I thought it was a pretty amazing story and it inspired me to make a track that sounded like a plane hijack."

The album’s happiest record ‘Good Vodoo’ is also the first single. With Chela Simone’s soulful vocals and old skool-sounding lead line the track is a jovial trip, albeit, a rather muted one.

The surreal video, directed by a graduate called Kama from Milan’s University of Arts, mirrors the tracks bizarre yet darkly enticing motion. Kiki says, “I trusted him with it and gave him free rein. I really like what he came back with. It’s quite arty. Because the track has these weird horns in it, he had these people in a field playing with wheels. And the man and the woman in it represent the vocals, which talk about ‘longing for somebody’ and ‘I want you here with me’.”

Video: Kiki ‘Good Vodoo’

Ellen Allien & Bpitch Control

‘Kaiku’ is on Ellen Allien’s Bpitch Control, which Kiki admits is the perfect home for his artistry. He’s been with the label for eight years and their relationship is so rock solid that his MySpace address is ‘/kikibpitchcontrol’. “When we started working on the LP I said, ‘Uh oh, we’ve been together for seven years’. The seventh year of marriage is apparently the hardest, but it all worked out,” he jokes.

Kiki first met Allien in a club in Berlin where to two of them were spinning in opposite rooms. “The promoter decided to put the party into the one room and he had us play back to back. We loved the experience and became friends,” he says.

One of the key components behind ‘Kaiku’ was the freedom that Allien granted to Ijäs. “She gives the artists on Bpitch complete freedom and that’s very important to her.”

The darkness then, is all Kiki. He continues to hoodwink, trick and deceive us all with his charming good looks and gentleman’s touch, but don’t be fooled. His eyes might be blue, but he prefers the shadows.

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