The music Jussi Lehtisalo loves the most drives him to make his own music. Talking to him about his favourites makes me want to go and make some music, too. He is a person who always sees a glass half full; a jolly, open-hearted music obsessive brimming with infectious enthusiasm for the albums he loves.
Over more than three decades of playing, Lehtisalo’s main output has been as core founding member of prolific rock-metal-prog-kosmische-experimental group Circle, who have (if the hyphenated genre list wasn’t obvious) covered vast terrain since their founding. In a primer on the group, this website signposted albums as ambient Circle; motorik Circle; punk Circle; metal Circle; and unclassifiable Circle albums.
Since 1991 Circle have roamed wherever they pleased, and charmed wherever they roamed, sometimes calling themselves part of the NWOFHM (New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal), often wearing spangled Spandex leggings and studded belts, or neon body paint, and they once traded names with another band called Falcon for a year, in a successful attempt to complicate their own legacy. The group was started in Pori by Lehtisalo and original drummer Juha Ahtiainen in 1991 (although now only two members of the band are from Pori). His parents moved there in the late 60s because his dentist father “saw there were a lot of people, but not a lot of dentists in the phone book”. Pori, Lehtisalo, tells me, is a typical industrial city where people are mainly into ice hockey, but where an alternative music culture sprang up in the late 80s and 90s.
Currently they are preparing for an exhibition titled Piste (Point, in English) opening at Pori art museum on February 1 this year. It will be a homecoming of sorts, to inaugurate the newly renovated museum. “We are very excited about it, as it’s the first time we’ve done this kind of exhibition,” says Lehtisalo. The exact character of Piste is staying somewhat under wraps, but it will include performances and interventions around a colossal sculpture described by the gallery as ‘taking the geometric form of a pentakis dodecahedron’. “It’s sort of Stonehenge style,” says Lehtisalo, “and there will be audio,” he adds cryptically. Alongside all this Lehtisalo is a member of numerous side projects – Pharaoh Overlord, Aktor, Mahti, among others – and runs Ektro records and its sublabels. He says he’s had a quieter time of it the last few years, but you wouldn’t know from the list of recent releases that comes through from the PR, which names six from last year alone. Coming down the pipe in the next year or two is a new album by Aktor; a live release of Swedish psychedelic prog group Trad Gras Och Stenar; an album he’s made with Anla Courtis, and a second album with Richard Dawson, after 2021’s Henki. I ask what dreams he still has for Circle, this far down the line. “In the last three decades we have made a lot of music with Circle. And our main point is that we are not worried about whether it is good or bad, because our main purpose is just doing music. Maybe later someone will tell us if we did something good or bad, but we are a collective and we just want to make music, like, a lot. So, we are living in our dreams right now, since we started this collaboration with Richard Dawson. He’s our front man right now, and we are working on our second album, and it feels like if I was an ice hockey player, I just got the chance to play in the NHL.”
