Art questions June 2022

Q: How do you promote yourself? 

A: I haven't figured out a good way to do that. It's so easy to say: go out there and promote yourself. What if they don't know what the hell I'm talking about? What if the atmosphere is so putrid that anyone promoting real creativity is immediately excluded? 

You can't promote everything the same way. We all know what happens when you try to homogenise the markets. The bar gets lower and lower. 

People should stop reducing everything to numbers. You can't even see all the numbers in one place. We exist outside of that system. Anyone taking this seriously should be focusing on the work itself. I don't care about ratings. 

I don't even have a wikifeet rating. Is it worse to have a low rating than no rating at all? You should know. Apparently you're all number fanatics. We are people not numbers. It's time to fight back.

New track and album announcement

Thundering Cascade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcYSow0tWz4

Night of the Seven Suns - album out August 27, 2022.

Night of the Seven Suns is my 20th album and it was inspired by material I wrote 20 years ago. It is similar to my first album released in 2012.

Night of the Seven Suns is also a 1966 photo book by Matti A. Pitkänen. It portrays a year in the wilds of Kuusamo. Titles on the album were taken from the book. Original Finnish texts by Airi Hast.

Music, artwork and production by Rinta-Perälä. Written between 2000 and 2021. Recorded in Silence & Desolation Studio, December 2021 - February 2022.

It used to be OK to talk about unknown artists

It's hard to think of anything so desperately stupid as blatant status worship.

If I see something stupid, I'm going to call it stupid. I don't want to live in a world filled with assholes. If the way you describe the world and your audience sounds stupid, what does that say about your so-called audience?

It is extremely cynical to focus on the mechanics instead of the motives. To think that every artist's success is based on likes, hashtags, mainstream endorsements, transactional garbage and pretence. That every musician's dream is to be included in some cheeseball playlist.

I'm criticising the masses without mentioning age. Anyone can make these mistakes. It doesn't matter how old you are. I have never talked about a specific generation, but what I'm going to talk about is the future.

My art is rarely about predicting the result. When people call an artist a prophet, they are talking about the artist's visionary qualities, not marketing strategies. It is the result of exploration and tireless dedication. The result of asking the right questions instead of memorising the right answers.

If this doesn't continue, creativity will not have a future.

Art questions May 2022

Q: You are a one-man filmmaker. Is there any element of filmmaking you dislike?

A: I hate trailers. I have always hated them and they did nothing for my imagination, unlike posters.

I recently saw Four Flies On Grey Velvet again and I saw the Italian trailer for the first time. It's one of my favourite trailers because it was designed. They had some props from the film but they shot some simple things for the trailer. That's how you do it. Make a trailer that creatively represents your film.

It's funny because this interesting film was obscure for years, but the trailer is one of the best I've seen. I still haven't made any myself.