Music Beyond Analysis: Understanding Oranssi Pazuzu, Metal's Strangest Band
Thursday, 10 October 2024
Written by Matt Mills
Photo: Rainer Paananen
The second you tap play on Oranssi Pazuzu’s new album, ‘Muuntautuja’, you’re sucked ear-first into an immersive yet nightmarish void. Bioalkemisti begins the record with a series of pulsing synths, their ever-quickening speed pulling you closer. It’s a hypnotic induction into a 42-minute maelstrom of black-metal screams, krautrock, psychedelia and noise, which swirls and disorients while the rhythms stay simple, keeping you stuck in place and bobbing your head as all manner of hell unfurls. In 2024, no other metal album has felt so challenging while remaining accessible at the same time.
By the time ‘Muuntautuja’ releases you from its grip, easing you back to reality with finale Vierivä Usva’s gentle keyboards, your list of questions might well be infinite. Who made this? What’s their story? And what array of influences could possibly inspire something so eclectic and consistently alien? Well, let’s ask two of Oranssi Pazuzu’s co-founders, singer/guitarist Juho ‘Jun-His’ Vanhanen and bassist/lyricist Toni ‘Ontto’ Hietamäki.
Jun-His and Ontto started their band in 2007, along with multi-instrumentalist Ville ‘Evil’ Leppilahti, drummer Jarkko ‘Korjak’ Salo and a guitarist known only as ‘Moit’. Seventeen years later, four of the original five are still involved, with Moit having been replaced by Niko ‘Ikon’ Lehdontie. The other members are near-lifelong friends. Jun-His and Ontto met in their early teens, through the tight-knit rock scene of Tampere, the town nearest to where they grew up in the Finnish countryside. Their camaraderie is given away by how frequently they make each other laugh, plus the fact they’re just as eager to ask each other questions as their interviewer is.
Jun-His names his earliest musical love as Jimi Hendrix, and already the building blocks of Oranssi Pazuzu’s adventurous approach begin to emerge. “It was his expressive guitar playing,” he explains. “What can you do with the guitar to express yourself, rather than just play chords? Hendrix had really interesting, noisy stuff going on. He was pushing boundaries even back then.”
Hendrix was a fixture on the frontman’s parents’ radio, while Ontto heard a lot from The Beatles at home. These artists naturally led the two towards psychedelia and krautrock. Then, Jun-His remembers Ontto turning him on to the equally envelope-pushing realm of Norwegian black-metal.
“I was underage and innocent,” he laughs. “I was into classical music. We were in Toni’s place years and years ago, and he played [symphonic black-metal pioneers] Emperor to me. It felt like a natural continuation from classical music, although I had to get used to the harshness.”
“Emperor had been my introduction as well,” Ontto adds. “It sounded like noise to me at first, but then I found out that there were detailed compositions behind that noise. When I discovered Darkthrone a couple years later, that’s when I really got into black metal and the raw, unhinged stuff.”
Oranssi Pazuzu were formed out of this shared passion for intense and ambitious music. According to Ontto, their unique approach was furthered by how isolated they were, playing music by themselves in the middle of nowhere. “In a larger city, we would probably have found these smaller scenes and maybe not explored the different sides of our musical thinking,” he says. “I imagine it would have been easier to just jump from one band to another, and maybe you don’t need to work together for five years to find your common sound.”
Jun-His adds that Oranssi Pazuzu’s harshness was encouraged by the politics of many people around them, who upheld the values of a remote, rural life. “It was so conservative musically, as well as in other things, in that area,” he says. “We wanted to push against that, to make our music even nastier and more experimental because of the traditional values in that area. It was a kind of young rebellion, in that sense.”
When it comes to composing, improvisation is essential for Oranssi Pazuzu. The band meet up, jam, and record the sessions. They then arrange the most interesting off-the-cuff ideas into songs. Ontto claims that the members being friends for as long as they have smooths the process. “We know each other so well that, when I see Juho is starting to get annoyed, he doesn’t even have to say anything to me,” he smiles.
‘Muuntautuja’ was different, however. Writing for the follow-up to April 2020’s ‘Mestarin Kynsi’ started in lockdown, with members working in isolation and coming up with more atmospheric sounds. Some of that music made the cut, like on the long-running and haunting Ikikäärme. The rest was written after the band toured in 2022. The semi-improvised way they played ‘Mestarin Kynsi’ finale Taivaan Portti live inspired further experiments with noise, to the point that Oranssi Pazuzu compare the new album to hip-hop speaker-smashers Death Grips.
“During the rehearsals, whenever we had a break, we were listening to them,” says Ontto. “There is this intensity in their production. They only have a few elements in each song, but they push them all to 11. You get this very simplistic but super in-your-face mix.”
Lyrically, like the rest of Oranssi Pazuzu’s work, ‘Muuntautuja’ is all delivered in Finnish. Its title means “shapeshifter” in English and the songs, Ontto tells us, discuss such lofty themes as existentialism and transformation. He writes about these things because they scare him, with that horror feeling perfectly at home alongside the cerebral and unsettling music.
For international listeners, the Finnish words make Oranssi Pazuzu even more enigmatic. Ontto says this wasn’t intentional, though. “We think in Finnish, and we feel that it’s more expressive to ourselves to do it in our native language,” he explains. “I also think the sound of the language fits the music. Finnish is a little bit brutal.”
The term “expressive to ourselves” seems like the perfect summary of Oranssi Pazuzu. From the start, making mind-melting metal as rebellion against sleepy countryside life, through to ‘Maantautuja’, commercial impact has been of no concern. Instead, these mavericks are making personal music from their own language, their own fears and their own esoteric list of idols. The irony is that that honesty also offers the capacity to move and fascinate others, something that will only become more apparent when they land in the UK for a run of shows opening for Icelandic post-metallers Sólstafir in November.
“I think it was in Greece when some really big guy with a beard came to me after the show,” recalls Jun-His. “He looked like he was gonna hit me or something, but he was crying. He was so emotional about the music. That’s the best it can get: an emotional reaction. When music makes you feel something that cannot be analysed, that’s a really cool thing.”
Oranssi Pazuzu’s ‘Muuntautuja’ is out October 11 via Nuclear Blast.
Sólstafir w/ Oranssi Pazuzu Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Wed November 20 2024 - BRIGHTON Concorde 2
Thu November 21 2024 - MANCHESTER Club Academy
Fri November 22 2024 - DUBLIN Opium
Sat November 23 2024 - GLASGOW QMU
Sun November 24 2024 - LONDON Electric Brixton
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