Es / Sami Sänpäkkilä

Hämeenkatu

Sami Sänpäkkilä is also Es who runs the ace Fonal records, and he makes short films.

Below is some text I wrote for Plan B when I was supposed to review a gig. So I'm not sure it got printed. But what's nice about putting it up here is I get to link it up to the short 16mm and super 8 films, lovingly converted into quicktime. And screen printed posters, and Fonal Jukebox (check TV resistori for good pop) and this way sincere adjectives such as 'mesmerising' can be bypassed for action. Great. So:

The Hague is a quiet city, a tram brings us to a basement next to a canal where the walls are filled with screen printed posters that remind me of Rhode Island. We're here to see Sami Sänpäkkilä of Fonal Records show us his films. Short experiments, each one a study of a certain condition; a description in repetitive image and sound, they have been called trances. A bearded Dutch man introduces the films, we understand nothing. The first piece starts and ends with a woman trudging endlessly through snow. The crunches can't be heard for drone, and outside thoughts spiral into the white. The pace then shifts dramatically for Hämeenkatu, where buildings flash past to loops of two warped tones. The facades are viewed as if they were a tree being encircled from below, and we are attached to an unravelling, spinning swing. The buildings are never entered, the night passes, and in the next moment we are on the edge of a forest. 'She puts out the fire in her heart with her tears' illustrates the portrait of a melancholic, grey pine forest. Denied entrance, we hover slightly above the tips of the trees, banished to its perimeter, doomed to pivot back and forth. Made between 2002 and 2005 on super 8 and 16 mm, Sänpäkkilä's films speak of an overbearing natural world, and its impenetrable physicality, a mesmerising accompaniment to his sound experiments.

ENDNOTE:
This place in the Hague is called Helbaard and I think they might have screen printing facilities because they (I don't know who, yet) make these posters for their shows that remind me of the best Dernier Cri work: