Various Artists - Harmonia Family Album

Recording info

Spring 2006 was both cruel and exciting. Radiating hot Helsinki nights, too much light and vivid, restless dreams about Music. While chucking down a glass of cheap brandy in a local bar the idea finally materialized: Let's start a record label! A label that would bring people together. Proud people. People thinking of Music. People doing their own thing in their own way in their own basements. And most importantly, people who understood the meaning of space between notes. After 5 years, 16 records, 85 tracks and 44 artists from 13 countries it goes without saying that those restless dreams became reality. And so did the Music.

HARMONIA FAMILY ALBUM includes 12 artists from 7 countries giving their own interpretations of skweee, the synthetic Scandinavian funk. This double album features both skweee -innovators and brilliant second generation rookies like Finnish dub specialist Levon Zoltar and Japanese child prodigy Neo Hetare. Most of the time compilation albums are just piles of second rate leftover tracks, but that's not the case with Harmonia. The process of compiling these twelve tracks took more than six months, since each track was carefully handpicked from a selection of more than hundred songs from around the world. Harmonia's previous 'Skandinavian Skweee Vol. I &II' and 'International Skweee Vol. I&II' -compilations were immediately sold out after release and nowadays go up to 100 euros on internet.

Because skweee owes so much to the so-called world music, we thought of taking the whole thing to the next level and asked our artists to make their own versions of 'ethnic' music. As you will soon hear, the idea took off like a lazer beam in an Ethiopian desert. The results are breathtaking: music so contemporary yet still so archaic! It gives a great deal of pleasure to the listener to hover through the native American mantras of BMMB's Huuhka-Eno, tribal chanting of Ransta Congregate and slavic p-funk of Eero Johannes. This Music was not made for everybody, but since you found it we'd like to salute You.

Viva Harmonia!