"Prospektor"

In May 2008 Helsinki's Presence Records will release "Prospektor", the new album by woodwinds multi-instrumentalist Hepa Halme. The album includes seven attic jazz flavoured originals recorded at the artist's summer house in Pornainen, Finland.

The attic is a mysterious place. It can also be a place of creation and a sanctuary. At least if you ask Finnish woodwinds multi-instrumentalist Hepa Halme, an artist who can boast an impressive and wide-ranging CV for his career expanding well into its third decade. His experience ranges from punk to free jazz to performing arts and beyond.

For a couple of years now, his trusty mini-studio in the attic of a summer cottage in Pornainen has been a getaway and office at the same time. An artist's office, that is. Complete with a heavilyslanting ceiling, a window small enough too keep the dim in and even your average beehive featuring real live buzzing residents, Hepa's attic has witnessed many a late night turned early morning solitary jam session. When you come to think of the distinct smell and feel of a good attic, a bright summer's night, perhaps a sparrow in the sky somewhere, it almost seems that creation is a compulsory course of events in these tranquil surroundings.

And created Hepa has. Much has changed in the business of making music since the first ideas that ended up on this record saw the light of day. In fact, one of the main instigators for this album has been the fruitful employment of handy technology. Starting from scratch and applying layer after layer, summer after summer, Hepa Halme has built an audio mosaic minimalistic in many ways, yet so delicate in detail that it's only fair it has taken him some years to complete. Some of the musical concepts on this record even date back to the dawn of the 1980's when Hepa entered the local music scene.

There's freedom and improvisation within Hepa's framework of, yes indeed, "attic jazz". But there's also form. These are songs. Introspective and delicate textures build up upon each other continuously as the compositions grow into entities in their own right. The album draws to a close by an excerpt of nightly bird song, a recorded fragment of the audio landscape where this music comes from.

As Shakespeare could have put it: "If attic be the food of jazz, stay on".

www.myspace.com/hepahalme

Press:

Matti Nives
Publicist
matti@somethinelse.fi
+358 40 735 3825

Label:

Presence Records
Matti Kervinen (Label Manager)
matti@presencerecords.fi
+358 40 768 5436