Appearing in our collective website email inbox, Finnish act Katoaja displays an interesting blend of rock and metal influences across the board for their debut album What We Witness. Aspects of Genesis to Pain of Salvation, Gojira to Opeth, and everything in between appear in the songwriting and performances for this set of material. We reached out to bassist Matias Ärrälä and vocalist Juho Kiviniemi to learn more about their musical background, how the band came together, the work behind the album, thoughts on the Finnish metal landscape, worries about the world, and insight into the next record.
Dead Rhetoric: What are your earliest memories surrounding music growing up in childhood? At what point did you gravitate towards heavier or more progressive forms of music – and eventually the desire to want to perform in bands?
Matias Ärrälä: My beginnings with music overall started with my mom’s record collection. Saturday Night Fever, the soundtrack, Jamiroquai, and all kinds of 70s disco stuff. That’s where the rhythm heavy disposition comes in originally, because I love to dance and bang on stuff when I was a kid. When I was around twelve, I found a friend who played the drums, and a bass was handed to me in a music class. It was the first time music made sense to me. The first song I played was by Ozzy Osbourne.
Then of course we are both from northern Finland, and heavy metal is very prominent over there. Many famous metal bands from Finland come from up there. That’s what many of my friends listened to, and it was the cool thing to like. I grew out of thinking about the coolness of it and just found the subject matter fascinating and the rhythmic content of it. I also fell in love with progressive rock, Yes, Genesis, and King Crimson, quite early. They are cinematic and the story-telling qualities, especially in like Relayer, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, all of the craziest stuff has stuck with me the most. Although I do love simple pop stuff made well of course. The things that have stuck with me the most have been rhythmically complex, and somehow innovative.
Now I’m thirty, and we got the ball rolling with this band a couple of years ago. It’s been a long progression.
Juho Kiviniemi: My father was quite the prolific accordion player. He was doing the Finnish touring circuit for a while. That’s the earliest memory for me, entertaining people and playing music could be a thing that you could do. For me, it was a coincidence that my brother played bass in a band up north where I was from. Somewhere around high school, it was full of guitar players, nobody seemed to want to play bass. At that time, I thought I could borrow my brother’s bass. That was around the time when Nightwish was starting to get really huge. That’s how I got into the heavy music stuff. We were trying to do covers of Children of Bodom, Pantera, stuff like that. We met for the first time doing a pop/jazz conservatory at the same time. Metal was on our minds, and Matias was playing in this cool Jimi Hendrix tribute (act).
Eventually we moved to Helsinki to do more studies in music. I started doing music production studies and Matias did more bass studies full-time. Things happened, I had these songs – and it has come to this point. We knew each other at the school, and I’m glad we got together to do this.
Ärrälä: One thing too is we have both played tons of different kinds of music. For work and for leisure, and we are not shy about that. In a way we are kind of from the outside of metal, but we both have a really long running love for this.
Dead Rhetoric: Tell us about the origins of Katoaja – how you arrived at the members that are involved, as well as your unique band name?
Kiviniemi: When I was doing my music production studies, there was a time where I had to do my thesis thing. The whole thesis was about how to incorporate lots of synthesizers in metal music, because there wasn’t a lot of material about it. How to get into it, because it’s such a guitar-oriented genre to begin with. I did that, and it was okay. At that time, we were done with that project, and I went to do my exchange studies in the Netherlands. I remember feeling like suddenly everyone was bonding around me nicely, but I didn’t find any traditional party life, exchange studies and I started doing songs in my dormitory. One of the first songs I made is the first song on the album “Nothing and Nothing More”. And the title track.
I sent those songs to the guys, and everyone seemed to be into it. At first, we weren’t even making an album to be fully honest. We were just messing around. Our guitar player Miko (Tekoniemi) and our drummer Eero had this rehearsal space they were using for this pop artist they were working with here in Finland, so they told us they had this space, maybe we can use this for recording. That’s how it started. And when Matias made the second song fully “The Sinking Cathedral”, it started to feel like this would be an album.
About the name of the band – we were rolling around with lots of different ideas. It was just something that stuck. We wanted to say something (that was) mysterious. In Finnish the name would roughly translate to ‘he/she who disappears or vanishes’. That sounds interesting. And we wanted it to be one word, we wanted to avoid a whole sentence because that is a metalcore thing.
Ärrälä: We also desperately wanted to avoid the heavy metal Latin thing (laughs). We wanted something that we could really stand behind. It’s in everything we do, really – up to the song titles, the tones that we use. We want everything to be something that feels fresh and inspiring.
Dead Rhetoric: What We Witness is the band’s debut album. What can you tell us regarding this set of material as far as the songwriting and recording process? How do you feel about the final output at this point in time?
Ärrälä: The album, the order in which the songs appear on the album is basically the order in which they were recorded, if I remember correctly. You can hear the progression throughout the album that we eventually started to know what we were doing. Especially vocal-wise. We were a bit new to the whole screaming thing. I had actually done it more than Juho had – but we learned it together. By the time you get to the last track “The Source”, it starts to sound kind of brutal (laughs). We’ve been working on new material already, and the vocals have been a non-issue now, we have learned how to do it in a pleasing way to us.
About the recording process. It came down to me and the drummer Eero, rehearsing the songs together and recording the songs live in the room together. Then guitars, vocals, and keyboards were layered on top of that. In the case of “Nangijala”, the keyboards were from the demo version, so we played over the top of those (parts).
Kiviniemi: In retrospect, it felt risky sometimes. We had some issues getting people to the same place. I feel the end result feels very coherent. It feels like a whole album instead of a bunch of singles put after each other. It had this danger aspect all the time in that sense, and this is something that we are going to change for the second album. We didn’t rehearse these songs as much as maybe we would have liked. It keeps the whole thing interesting.
Ärrälä: It did feel a little bit dangerous. We turned off the click tracks for a couple of sections on a few songs.
Kiviniemi: Overall I think (the record) turned out really great. And that’s probably because all the individual players have a really strong foundation. This is not our first band by any means, we have been doing all kinds of stuff. That’s what made it possible to do this in kind of a disjointed way. I’m really happy, and I think the lyrics and storytelling aspect came out really good.
Ärrälä: The narrative aspects that came about lyric-wise, it was kind of an accident. We didn’t know we were making an album during the recording of the first track. The music told us what to do in a sense. It feels weird, because it’s a complete product and everything feels like it makes sense now but most of it didn’t make sense to us during the actual process. We were just doing what sounded good. I mostly tried to convey a consistent theme and use words that sounded good coming out of my mouth. (laughs). It ended up making sense.
Dead Rhetoric: You made a conscious effort to keep things more organic and less polished, especially in the rhythm section department, with the production and tones on this album. Can you discuss your thought process behind this?
Kiviniemi: It comes down to our preferences in what we like to listen to in not just metal music. We like things when it comes to the rhythm instruments, I want to hear the personality of the players. When you listen to old thrash records, I like the feeling that it barely holds together and it’s going crazy. I strongly feel that 90% of modern metal records are totally overproduced. They almost sound like EDM – which I do love as EDM, but not in my metal music, please. That was the core intention – let’s not overedit this, let’s just let things sound natural. It’s nice to record what’s going on in our heads musically in the moment.
Ärrälä: For me production-wise, it was very important to give this record an organic feel. I have played on albums in which I listen to the final product, and I felt like it would have been totally irrelevant who played the bass on it. For example, it is produced to such a sterilized sausage, it could have been any one of my bass colleagues or programmed. It makes everything feel less worthwhile to me. On some of my favorite albums, you can hear every player’s personality so clearly. David Bowie’s Blackstar, or Synchronicity by The Police. I would like to strive for this when making music that we are really not going to make a profit on. Speaking bluntly – first and foremost this is for us, and the more we make this for us with very hardline principles, the more it might resonate with someone else.
Dead Rhetoric: What would you consider some of the biggest challenges the band faces at this stage of your career?
Ärrälä: Getting gigs! (laughs)
Kiviniemi: Yeah, that’s the big one. This is an international issue, in Helsinki as well as all across Finland. There are a number of decent-sized clubs that have been closed down, so you need to send out emails very early to the venues. Anything that is good for this size band, it’s so hard to get the right people even to connect with them. They get hundreds and hundreds of emails. It’s something that is not a very Finnish thing to do, to annoy people with emails. But you need to do this.
Musically speaking, we don’t really have any challenges. I feel we are surprising ourselves as we have similar backgrounds in music. The whole starting to get the live train running is the biggest hurdle right now.
Dead Rhetoric: Where do you see the major differences in playing live versus how the songs are on record?
Ärrälä: According to the few live performances we have done, we like things a bit more brutal live. We want the impact to be a bit heavier. Less of the ambient qualities live as well. We don’t use click tracks or backing tracks live at all. We like it that way. We love Meshuggah and all those bands that have this huge live impact. You can be more subtle on record, but live you have to be a bit more immediate.
Kiviniemi: That’s the main difference. Live is more straightforward and more brutal. If I don’t feel after a live gig just dying a little bit, then I haven’t done enough. In my experience, with the few gigs we have done, people seem a little bit surprised about this fact. I’m hesitant about the label of progressive metal to be honest. That’s because it tends to mean so much that it doesn’t really mean anything. You always get, ‘oh – you are like Dream Theater?’. Yes, sure – but that’s not what we are going after.
Dead Rhetoric: How do you view the metal landscape across Finland/Scandinavia versus other parts of the globe?
Ärrälä: Finland has its own style of metal traditionally, but it has become a bit more homogenized with what’s going on globally. I think people are under so much pressure to have music that sounds like valid internationally. Production quality and style-wise, it has stifled the creativity in the Finnish metal scene a bit I feel. There are great Finnish metal bands still – especially like older ones that have zero interest in what’s going on in contemporary metal. Like Stam1na for example – they just do their own thing, and it’s brilliant. Finland has this weight on its shoulders, metal-wise because of bands like Nightwish, HIM, Sonata Arctica. They have represented Finland in metal for so long. There are many copycats of those bands.
Kiviniemi: When it comes to Finland, the shadows of those giants are so huge. To me, personally, the metal scene – there are two or three melodic death metal bands in every little town. The basic baseline qualities are fine. Everybody knows how to produce good sounds, for me personally they are artistically stagnant. There are good things going on also – when it comes to Finland, things are evolving. Most bands are struggling to make things appealing, because of streaming, you have to get to immediate choruses. Overall, globally, there are lots of cool things going on – I’m not especially worried. The best things are still to come. Oranssi Pazuzu is one of the most amazing bands, their new album has been a great success globally. We are friends with one of the guitar players, we went to school with him.
Dead Rhetoric: What concerns or worries do you have the most about the world that we live in today? If you had the opportunity to work on one or two things to make society better as a whole, what do you think needs to be tackled first?
Ärrälä: As the political and lyric writer of the band, oh man, where do I begin? Maybe I should focus on one thing. The trifecta of China, US, and Russia is really scary right now. Oligarchies, billionaires, all that. Our lyrics aren’t online, but once they are – “Sinking Cathedral” are my brief thoughts on this subject. Money is the root of all evil. That’s all that is about, the things I mention. Money, influence. That’s a broad subject, and I’m really not equipped to delve into this much deeper. The imbalance of power, all that I’m rooting for (is) the little guy.
Kiviniemi: One big thing would be to make things better – keep pushing money to good education. That’s mostly because so much of the current landscape seems to be about information, warfare, and things like that. If we at some point can come to a common base of facts, things will get a little bit easier.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s on the agenda for the next year or so with Katoaja in terms of promotion, live performances, etc.?
Kiviniemi: At the moment we are getting the ball rolling with live shows. The big one for us, we will start rehearsing for a second album. We almost have this second one done composing-wise.
Ärrälä: The second album, of which we cannot say too much about, there’s something we know about it already. Now that we’ve had some experience playing live, we’ve tried to get that heavier impact, we notice that this second album will be more brutal, more direct. There will be less of those ambient things. It’s going to be much crazier, too. We have played two brand new songs live too, and they’ve gone down well live. We are feeling confident with our direction.