Kompleksi

MikeNot pHinn

Tampere, Finland

Kompleksi is an eclectro act from Tampere, Finland, who has released one LP, "Sister Longlegs Dances In The Disco" (Verdura Records, 2008). Get it now, only 4€ when you buy directly from Verdura Records! It's a collector's limited edition vinyl album with a flashy colour sleeve by pHinnWeb Graphics. Check more info on how to order the album from: http://www.verdurarecords.com/ If you want to encompass the full-fledged Kompleksi audiovisual experience, please follow the attached links to other Kompleksi Web resources. You can also hear more tracks on Kompleksi's Tumblr page. "Kompleksi ('Complex') are an Electro-Pop group from Tampere, the post-industrialist city sometimes known as 'the Manchester of Finland,' where concrete Neo-Brutalist tower-blocks and decaying factories sit a short distance from woods and park-land." [...] "Firstly, though, it's important to understand that Kompleksi are neither an ironic parody nor nostalgic kitsch; they have little in common with any of the retro-engineered electro-punk groups that currently have a stranglehold on UK style-mags. Instead, they should perhaps be seen as part of a Finnish electronic music lineage that stretches back to 60s mavericks like M.A. Numminen and Erkki Kurenniemi, via the 80's Helsinki Futu ('Futurism') scene that spawned local synthpop groups like Organ and Stressi. And we should also include the Finnish label Sähkö ('Electricity'), whose pioneering early 90s roster created the original template for Minimal Techno: all these disparate influences have congealed into a wonderfully sticky synthetic stew called Kompleksi." [...] "Kompleksi's songs are often inhabited by a palpable feeling of melancholy; their lyrics articulate an acute sense of disappointment about lost cultural opportunities or times passed that resonate on a personal level as well as an historical one. The band gleefully invert the usual Modernist tropes, so that songs about the sixties space-race or working together to create a futuristic socialist paradise become metaphors for failed relationships or emotional stasis." [...] "For Kompleksi, the Future never quite happened - the golden age we were promised never materialised - like the rest of us, they have been left stranded with their expectations and disappointments in the concrete Here and Now. In this respect they could almost be categorised as an Anti-Glam group: their lyrics hark back to the kitchen-sink mini-Soap Opera approach of Soft Cell or early League, to an era before electronic music became part of the mainstream Pop vocabulary or was co-opted as a soundtrack to the cat-walk. They're also funny as fuck." [...] "But be prepared to loosen your expectations when you listen to them: Kompleksi's fusion of Eastern and Western pop sensibilities will initially sound both familiar and alien, especially if your ears have been blunted by over-exposure to pre-packaged post-Britpop acts. Trust me: these Finns have the potential to breathe new life into this jaded genre in the same way that Jap bands rejuvenated heavy psychedelic rock." (Quotes from Kek-W @ Fact Magazine, UK, March 2008)