DJ “career”

I’ve never considered DJing as part of my work career, but I think it’ll be fun to write something about it.

What started purely as a hobby, became my weekend job at some point when things started to get more serious.

It all starts with skateboarding and snowboarding. With a snowboard movie from 1995 called “Odd Man Out”.

I got a copy of a copy VHS from a friend around 1996-1997 and that was the first “action sports” movie I had ever seen.

The soundtrack consisted of bands like Reef, Swervedriver and Silverchair. For me the most memorable part of the movie is where Oasis - Slide Away plays and there’s some amazing looking 16mm film footage from some deep powder freeriding. I have always been a fan of 16mm footage as it is used in skate- and snowboard videos usually in a slight slow motion and all the colors and vibes are really dreamy and beautiful.

Here’s an example from 2000, from a Transworld Skateboarding video i.e. - I absolutely love that Sunny Day Real Estate song by the way.

I was already a fan of Nirvana at the age of 13 when I saw Odd Man Out, but it’s soundtrack made me interested in to grunge & alternative rock. I was lucky to find Reef’s Glow CD from a gas station with a bargain price, and soon after I was into bands of all sorts as long as it sounded similar. As nu-metal was the coolest thing for a teenager back then, I was all into KoRn at some point.

Then in the spring of 1998 I got my first skateboard from a sport retailer Top Sport. It was Voltage’s Grinder. I thought it looked super cool but only few weeks later I realized Voltage isn’t a proper skateboard brand and “Grinder” was just a stupid word about the graphic where there was some guy grinding down an electric wire. Anyway I was hooked, from the point I got my skateboard I considered myself as a 100% skateboarder.

The Voltage board started to chip in just few weeks and I begged my mom to get me a proper skateboard. After collecting money for a while doing lawn mowing etc. for my parents, I got 500 finnish marks saved and spent it all to buy my first proper skateboard. World Industries “Superfly”.

“Superfly”. I asked my mom to take the photo right after I set up the board, so I would always have a memory how cool the board looked when it was brand new.

In summer 1998 all I did was skateboarding in Kalajoki and our neighbor town Pyhäjoki where couple of my ice hockey team friends had skateboards too. When the ice hockey season started that fall, I wasn’t into going there anymore. All I wanted to do was skateboarding and snowboarding, so I told my team JHT (Junkkarit Hockey Team) that I was out for good.

Musically, summer 1998 changed it everything for me. My friends in Pyhäjoki had a bunch of skate videos, so I loaned some of those VHS cassettes and copied them all to couple “master VHS” cassettes so I could re watch all of the movies on repeat.

To that point I had been all into grunge, indie rock, alternative rock or whatever, but then something changed when I saw 411 video magazine’s Issue #30. I discovered rap music for the first time. Please check the DC Euro Supertour clip at 8:30 mark, with 12 Jewelz - Crystalize. That beat still gives me shivers.

Just after rap music, I found so many other genres too, all thanks to skateboard videos.

I think all skateboarders can agree that the act of skateboarding is just one part of the whole thing which excites us in it, it’s the whole culture around it that makes it so special. That culture has always included music heavily, and skateboarding has always been very open to all kinds of music from jazz to reggae, from punk to techno.

Fast forward to 2004 when I was about to move to Helsinki. I had a music collection of maybe 100 CD’s of various stuff, mostly inspired by the music I had heard in skate and snowboard videos.

My dad used to be a record collector in his 20s and 30s, and we had a massive shelf of over 1000 records at home. Original pressings of all Led Zeppelin records, some really rare Beatles 7”’s and a lot of progressive rock from 70s that my dad said could fetch up to 2000€ a record in early 2000’s. They’re probably worth more than that these days. The whole collection looked impressive, it looked like it had a lot of history in it.

So when I moved to Helsinki, my dad helped me find a cheap record player, and I decided to buy all of my records on vinyl from then on. I remember setting up a monthly limit of 50€ for buying records, and every time I got a paycheck on the last day of the month, I went to record stores like Stupido, Funkiest, Eronen or Lifesaver to spend my monthly budget. Every time after the 1st or 2nd shop I had already spent that 50€, and if there was a slightest chance, I extended my budget with a record or two. I didn’t mind eating noodles or frozen pizzas for the rest of the month, as long as my record collection was growing.

Some of the first records I remember buying were

Boards of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children

DJ Shadow - Endtroducing

Dinosaur Jr. - Where You Been?

Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star

The genres really didn’t matter at all. I was into all sorts of music.

After maybe 2 years, I started to feel like I have an actual record collection. I had around 250 records at that point so to me it was starting to look like a record shelf. I had still a long way to go to get to a level where my dad’s collection was back home. When I moved to Punavuori in southern Helsinki in 2006, I decided to spend all of my savings for a pair of Technics SL-1200 record players. I paid 600 euros for a pair which was a huge investment for me back then. These days a pair of SL-1200’s in good condition can go for 2000€.

So at that point I had a small record collection, a pair of decks and a cheap Numark mixer. I started to train how to match the beats of two simultaneously playing records, and how to do a smooth mix from one channel to the other. I didn’t have any ambition to become a DJ at that point, I was just curious how the DJ’s I looked up to in Helsinki nightlife did the smooth mixes on their sets, I needed to find out the technique.

I hanged out a lot at Erottaja Bar at that time, which was a melting point for music people, the record nerds, graphic designers, sneaker heads and all kinds of semi-alcoholic hip people. One of the locals who hanged out there every night was Fiacha Harrington (R.I.P. my friend, I miss you), who said; “Oki, you know a lot about music and buy a lot of good stuff. Would you want to play records here with me next Wednesday?” I was scared. Just a thought of playing at a bar where there’s some random people in, listening to my music or my terrible mixing skills was frightening to me. I knew I listened to good music, but I thought I was fine just as a listener, not playing the records for people.

Erottaja Bar locals - me, Kaisa, Valtsu, Fiacha & Harri. Photo by Miika Saksi

After saying no to him at first, Fiacha said something like “Sooner or later you will be playing records anyway, better start on a Wednesday night when it’s not too crowded. It’ll be chill, trust me.” and then I said yes.

My first DJ gig was on a Wednesday night in January 2007 at Erottaja Bar with Fiacha a.k.a. DJ Filthy.

Erottaja DJ booth, this is where it all started for me.

On my way to the gig I walked past Stupido Shop in Iso Roba and bought this beautiful Morgan Geist 12” so I’d have something fresh for the gig. It took me years after to realize the vocals are by Jeremy Greenspan from Junior Boys, the band I still love to this day.

The gig was definitely scary. But with some beers and the “big brother” Fiacha on my side, it wasn’t too scary, I definitely had fun. I remember someone even came up to say that we play nice music, and that feedback was really helping me to stop worrying about everything that night. I enjoyed it.

My DJ name for the night was Hirviö (a monster), I had to come up with something quickly before the night, and as Pokemon’s used to be the coolest shit in 2000, and my email address “okimonster” I had created in early 00’s was inspired obviously by the Pokemon trend.

Valter “Valtsu” Filosof, the shop assistant at Stupido Shop, the cool guy of Punavuori, was also a Erottaja Bar local. He had heard I had played some records with Fiacha at Erottaja. Valtsu asked me if we should play together at some point, as we shared many common interests in bands and artists. He knew this of course from selling me the records at Stupido Shop, he of course probably owned all of the records already that I was buying from him.

With the help of our graphic designer friend, my office mate Miika Saksi, we concepted the name and visual identity for the duo and played our first gig in Erottaja on 23rd of February, 2007.

Flyer by Miika Saksi

Valtsu’s DJ name had been “Poika Välimereltä” (A boy from the mediterranean), but Poika Välimereltä & Hirviö sounded wack, so we re-worked the name that it’d be both of us coming from the Mediterranean. For our third gig Miika designed us a poster where it said Poika Ja Hirviö only.

He said the name is too long so we have to cut out the Välimereltä -part. From then on it was Poika Ja Hirviö, “the boy and the monster”.

Poika ja Hirviö at Erottaja Bar, our living room. Photo by Miika Saksi

Everything sort of escalated for us really quickly. We were playing records every month at Erottaja straight from the start with Valtsu and we got invited to play at our friend’s club nights in other bars too.

Before the end of the year 2007 we had our own club nights in Erottaja Bar and We Got Beef and we got quite a lot of extra gigs in other bars too. I was playing records 2-3 times a month.

If there’s one of the club nights in Helsinki that meant the most of us, it has to be Misf*ts at the night club Redrum, Vuorikatu. It was held every Thursday, so at that time our weekends started a day earlier than for most. Misf*ts was a cool mixture of punk attitude, raw alternative sounds ranging from indie to “nu rave” and they always brought some cool international DJ’s and bands to see. It was definitely the most exciting Thursday club Finland has ever seen.

To give perspective, a “quiet” Thursday night at Misf*ts was 200 guests. That doesn’t happen anymore on Thursday nights in Helsinki, with or without this pandemic situation we have going on.

We went there almost every Thursday with Valtsu, and sooner or later we started to hang out with the organizers Marko Makelove & Erkko as well. It maybe took few months to convince them, but eventually at some point Poika Ja Hirviö was invited to play at Misf*ts, and we loved it. Ed Banger, Kitsuné, Boys Noize.. all of that super noisy nu-rave stuff was our #1 thing at that time and we took our best selection of all kinds or post-punk, nu rave and electro clash to convince the organizers that we’d get invited again.

If I remember correctly, this was our slogan for our first guest DJ night at Misf*ts

Poika Ja Hirviö having a night off at Misf*ts, photo credits missing

From late 2007 to early 2009 I think Poika Ja Hirviö guest DJ’ed at Misf*ts closer to 10 times. And we were there more or less every Thursday anyway as guests.

Our Erottaja Bar nights were getting well recognized and the place was full packed every time we played there, Miika Saksi’s flyer designs definitely helped us to get people interested as they were always on point. Occasionally we invited our friends to guest DJ there as well, as seen in this video “ad” starred by Aleksi Pahkala.

In late 2008 our dear friend Katerina wanted to join forces with us to organize a weekend club night at Redrum, School of Life. Katerina was a night life expert, having years of experience already back then. She knew what to do and helped a lot on booking us international names and other operational things, as we really didn’t know the rules of running a night club residency. We were more used to just hang out in bars and go to clubs as customers or guest DJ’s with Valtsu. Katerina was just starting to become a DJ herself, so we could support her there encouraging her to play her sets.

Side note, these days Katerina is a internationally known recording artist and an amazing DJ who has had gigs in several continents. She was the only one from School of Life who graduated on this music thing! Please check out her Émotsiya and Kotarak labels on Bandcamp.

Our grand opening night for School of Life was on Friday 20th of Feb 2009. I still remember these posters were everywhere in the city.

Photography by Kaapo Kamu, poster design by Miika Saksi

Even though there was a bit of tension at first from Misft*s guys as now “their sound” was partly imported to our bi-monthly Friday nights in the same venue, we made sure that we’d play “softer” dance music as well in School Of Life, to not to copy the “Misf*ts sound” too much. We were really starting to get into nu-disco around the same time, which fit Friday nights quite well, dance floor was always happy at School of Life nights.

School of Life, photo most likely by Miika Saksi

Fun fact from School of Life. I had found about this up and coming artist Tensnake, I had bought couple of his 12”’s and I was so into his sound that I wanted to get him booked to play at School of Life. In 2009 his asking price was like 400€ + flights for a gig. The Redrum owners thought it was too risky as probably no-one would be interested, so they kindly declined my request. It only took couple years and Tensnake was one of the DJ headliners at Flow Festival 2011 with his summer hit Coma Cat (released January 2010) and with certainly a different price tag than what was offered to us.

Marko Makelove from Mis*fts guest DJ’ed couple times at our short lived indie rock only -night 100% INDIE at Kuudes Linja. The problem with 100% INDIE was that people wanted to get shitfaced and dance their assess off at Kuudes Linja, a night club on a Friday night just wasn’t the right place to play some Sonic Youth to people. People vote with their feet in the dance floor. We just couldn’t get enough people in, the party wasn’t vibing as it was in School of Life, so we had to give up with the idea just after three nights.

We realized maybe there’d be a chance to do it in a different place for a slightly different audience, so we approached Bar Loose in Annankatu which was known to be one of the very few rock oriented night clubs with a dance floor in Helsinki. Hellhole Ratrace’s first night was in August 2010 and it was a big success from the first night. This was our first club with a payment comission of every ticket sold, so we made few hundred euros a night with it, it felt like a huge payment for just to market it a bit, to show up and play records for few hours and party.

Hellhole Ratrace poster, design by Mika Lahtinen

Of all the club nights we organized, Club Nuori Suomi was probably my favorite.

Erottaja Bar was facing heavy financial issues in 2010 and got sold to new owners who basically changed the whole concept of the bar overnight from local DJ’s to weak playlists, and dozens of Erottaja locals were looking for a new place to hang out. As the new restaurant / night club Nolla was partly owned by the same people who had owned Erottaja Bar, it felt natural for us to move into Nolla with Poika Ja Hirviö. That said, Nolla never became the living room that Erottaja was to us, Nolla was more of a night club in a bar atmosphere for us even though it operated as a restaurant in day time as well.

Poster by Linda Linko

About our style of playing records. Poika Ja Hirviö was always based on this “Oh no you didn’t? Oh yes the f*ck I did!” -musical dialogue between me and Valtsu. Both of us were there of course to play good music for the audience, but most importantly to shock each other with crazy unexpected mixes from one genre to another, or just to play whatever we were vibing at the time. But we certainly were always aiming for that shock level in all of our nights.

For Nolla, we had quite a strict genre limit of dance music with Valtsu on what we play. This was actually a fun challenging approach, as we had used to do most of our nights in quite an eclectic style, playing whatever we wanted, now it was nice to focus on certain genres a bit more. For the first time we were really discussing about how we should build up our night, what songs to play early on, where to go from there when the dancefloor starts to heat up etc.. At the time I was spending 300-500€ a month to records, which I mostly bought from Juno Records UK and Discogs, but I supported a lot of local shops as well. Stupido Shop especially as my showroom was just a stones throw away so I visited there several times a week.

DJ Lauri Soini created the line up for Nolla weekends, and he wanted disco and mellow house to be the main thing in Nolla. It suited well for us, as we were shifting from nu-rave & “blog house” to more softer sound. Everything was a bit more adult-like. How the bar looked, how we dressed and what we played. Our nights were usually a big success, and we even got some budget to book international names to visit Club Nuori Suomi.

When I think of Nolla era, I think it was the Todd Terje era. Nothing sums up the Nolla sounds and the vibes better than Terje.

Club Nuori Suomi at Nolla.

I think at Nolla our DJ gigs become a bit too serious in the end. We were considered as “well-known” DJ’s and we already had a track record of running succesful club nights ourselves, so it wasn’t all fun and games anymore. I felt the pressure that we’d have to keep things rolling in a more professional way if we’d want to keep our spot. We weren’t the youngest up and comers in the Helsinki DJ scene anymore, there was already a new wave of DJ’s coming in and some of them were definitely more focused to DJing than us.

I sensed for Valtsu it wasn’t important at all to please the people who booked us, do marketing like mixtapes or blog posts (which were considered really important part of night life marketing at the time). For him it was all about the prime essentials - having a good time, drinking booze and playing good records. I was 100% in to that, but I felt we needed to put 10% extra on top of that to keep us on the limelight to get club nights from these cool venues.

That at the same time with my day job at Nike, and Four Down Distribution that I had just started in 2011, I felt at times that I was working 6-7 days of the week. Night shifts at DJ booths on weekends and early Monday sales calls for Nike wasn’t a combo I truly enjoyed. For the first time this weekend hobby was starting to stress me out.

Things got even more serious when we were asked to play at Flow Festival in 2012 and 2013. It was “just” a champagne bar gig on both occasions, but these Flow gigs certainly helped us to get even more gigs from bars and clubs around Helsinki. We even got to play in some other festivals like Turku Modern around the same time. We barely even promoted Poika Ja Hirviö to any organizers, we just mostly waited who wants to call us first.

Photo by Bryan Saragosa

Kuudes Aisti Festival, Helsinki 2013, photo credits missing

Turku Modern 2011 maybe? Things were sweaty.

Around the same time I started to do some “serious” solo gigs. I didn’t only want to be a good “party DJ”, I wanted to be considered as a good DJ as well. My solo gigs weren’t taking anything out from Poika Ja Hirviö, and I thought that would maybe lead to some bigger things for me & us. Or at least to secure our spot in the best bars and night clubs of Helsinki.

One night where I was playing strictly house on a more “professional” style, a local legend Sami “Sir Nenis” Nenola (who I had sponsored few years at Top Billin’ for years with Nike Sportswear) came up to me and said “Hey, you have the mixing skills and the music selection on lock. Now you should start to focus on this thing more and not to play around with it as a hobby. You’d have potential to get some gigs outside Finland as well if you just keep on focusing on this and start to promote yourself more.”

That was a turning point in my personal DJ “career”.

For some weeks Sami’s words were ringing in my head, and I needed to figure out in which direction I’d want to be heading.

Things could be different if I hadn’t just started the skateboard distribution at my newly opened Four Down Distribution. After thinking about it for a while I realized I had more than enough things going on already, and I’d have to focus on my day jobs a bit more and give up with the idea of becoming a more known DJ who could actually get some actual money from playing records.

Our usual payments were around 200-300€ a night, so splitted with Valtsu we were making just few hundred euros a month usually, no matter how many gigs we played. And that of course went ALL into buying more records. So it was a long way to get that shifted to a point where I could make a decent living with just playing records.

When I made that decision to give up with the idea of making DJing a living, it actually made our nights super fun again with Valtsu.

Maybe we both knew already that Poika Ja Hirviö would sooner or later be a thing of the past, so we were making the best of it what was left of it, and focused all energy to purely having fun.

One of the last monthly club nights we did was “Lasten Mehuhetki” in Siltanen, around 2013-2014. It was like a swan song of Poika Ja Hirviö’s few years of partying and club fame, some of the best nights we’ve ever played were there. People were singing, screaming, shouting and crying from joy. We could feel in the air that soon these nights would be over for us.

Poster design by Linda Linko

When night club Kaiku opened it’s doors in 2013, we were part of the original line up to have a monthly gig in Kammari, the smaller side of the club. After couple nights that we played there, we started to feel the vibe was a bit off.

We were doing the same thing we had done for years, but as there were two sides with an international headliner on the bigger side every weekend night, most of the budget was shifted over to the big side. That left us with a 75€ per head minus the taxes, the taxis and everything. Playing was fun as always, but for the first time ever we really started to count the ups and the downs of our weekend hobby.

Also, Valtsu had just started to work at Live Nation Finland, so we both had “serious” day jobs now.

We maybe did three nights at Kaiku and decided to not to play any night club gigs anymore. We were not young anymore, and for next to no money, we’d rather spend some weekends at home instead taking it easy.

Our last bar night we did was Club Hawasu in an atmospheric “Music Cellar” of Putte’s Bar. The newly opened pizzeria / bar was partly owned by the same people behind Erottaja Bar and Nolla, so once again we hoped that Putte’s would become the next living room for us in Helsinki. It actually was the closest thing to Erottaja Bar atmosphere that happened after Erottaja was sold. A lot of the old locals from Erottaja started to hang out at the Putte’s Cellar.

I think we only did two or three nights there together, as Valtsu was stressing out to give his best at Live Nation, playing records wasn’t something he was into anymore at that point.

I enjoyed playing so much at Putte’s with it’s amazing sound system that I did few nights more by myself, inviting some guest DJ’s along, but eventually I ended it too. I think it was around late 2014 or early 2015.

From 2015 to 2019 I occasionally got interested to do some nights here and there, but I cut down the amount of gigs to just 4-6 gigs a year at max.

Record shopping in Berlin, ca. 2015

Around 2016 I realized it was quite fun to play records in restaurants, to step down from the role of having to get the party going, more into creating a nice vibe to enjoy few drinks or a dinner with. I did most of the DJ gigs around that time with my good friend Kaius Järvensivu. With him we created a DJ duo Zäpfle Boyz as we both love the pine flavored pils from Hochschwarzwald, Germany, the Rothaus Tannenzäpfle.

Me, Kaius and Jesse Auersalo at Flow Festival 2019

We played in restaurants like Tenho, Pastor, Löyly and Jackie’s. Usually the payments were a bit better than in night clubs, our nights ended around 1-2 AM instead of 3-4 AM, and the staff food was definitely better than in some places we had played years earlier with Valtsu.

I never played with the name Hirviö anymore, so I started to use whatever DJ names I came up with. DJ A$AP OCKY, DJ Phil Killin’ Collins etc. All of these “whatever” names started with DJ as I never wanted to be called DJ Hirviö, I was always just a Hirviö. So I flipped that thought around with these tongue-in-cheek names just for fun. By the way I never considered myself as a DJ. I am and always was a record collector and a music lover, who occasionally had interest to play the records “professionally” as well.

The “serious” name I’ve had all these years was unhumdrum. As a side project of sorts.

unhumdrum logo by me, photo by Bryan Saragosa

My last club night I organized “professionally” was unhumdrum nights at Tanner in 2018-2019.

I wanted to do an “anti-party” kind of night for bi-monthly Friday nights, as Tanner was promoted at first as a “listening room” for music people.

The music I played at these nights was the most personal, most stripped down version of my musical journey. My hands were shaking on the first night as I was playing the records, not because I wouldn’t have the skills to play a music track after another on a set of SL-1200’s and an expensive rotary mixer, but because I felt the music itself was purely “my sound”. Playing those records felt really intimate to me, as I would play these songs to people at my home.

unhumdrum opening night at Tanner, I played “Laputa - Castle In The Sky” as visuals for the night

From all these years, I have some live recordings and mixtapes saved on Mixcloud, please have a listen if you’re interested.

I’d want to dedicate this post to all of the people I’ve gotten to work with during my DJ years. All the DJ’s I’ve met, the club owners, the bartenders, the friends visiting our nights.. Many of the DJ’s that were active around that era are still my good friends who I keep contact with daily.

Last but not least I want to thank Valtsu the most for all of these years. We have so many fun memories to reminisce on our retirement days.

You never know, we might do one comeback gig after COVID for the sake it’s been 15 years we played our first gig together, maybe at some point in near future it’ll be time to polish those nu-rave 12”s again..

Thank you Valtsu. Photo by Bryan Saragosa

Thanks for tuning in,

-Oki