Circle :: what album is their best

my vote is most likely to be for "pori" [which is the album that introduced me to the band].

I went for Sunrise.

geez.....just looking at this and realising i own 16 of these on cd. maybe i should seek help....

i want 16 of these...
drone = consider this the help you're asking for

Damn, I've only heard Surface!

forest. they 'went folk' in a completely bizarre way. plus the production is amazingly detailed and plays with 'space' in weird ways (esp. on headphones).

sunrise would probably be second for me. i've been listening to earthworm a lot lately, though, and jesters of destiny. and tower's alright.

Which is the one on tUMULt?

Pori the really krautrock-y one, right? And Sunrise has the Rob Halford vocals?

Wow I didn't realize they had so many records!?!? I think I have five or six and that's just a drop in the bucket.

Which is the one on tUMULt?

i think... pori and andexelt?

Okay then Andexelt is my favorite. Raunio, the live one, is really good too.

Andexelt is my favorite. Forest creeps me out in ways I can't describe.

tUMULt only licensed Andexelt. there was talk about Andee doing a reissue of Taantumus. which would be nice, as it and Kollekt are the only two to have eluded me. Pori was released by the Knitting Factory-related Feldspar imprint. weird, i know.

voting for Forest. for the reasons cited.

circle is the best band in the world!!!! it's a 3 way tie between Prospekt-Guillotine-Tulikoira and the winner is Guillotine by a hair! If you think Forest is scary, you really really need to yeah to hear this one it goes from beautiful to terrifying to bizarre to freaky to slow and tumbly drift to beautiful again and it's a heady trip indeed! AAACCCIIIDDD

sunrise! gave prospekt a moment's thought... but nah!

guillotine a doozy, yeah. love how they get all 'riders on the storm' on that last track.

so what's so disappointing about panic, anyway?

panic is really bewildering. it's 3/4 synthesizer arpeggios and ambience and 1/4 haywire synth overblown distortion crust punk. the first 15 minutes are the droney, then all the punkish songs come in a row (really shocking after the mellow beginning) then theres a longass song with barely any sound at all, just some swooshing (kinda like a Thomas Koner album) then an amazing 15 minute 7/4 synthed out but more typical song coforming to the Circle aesthetic (though lacking drums unfortunatly).

all in all its very confusing, i'm not sure who (besides hardcore Circle fans) is the intended audience.

with "Miljard" i could accept that as a nice little diversion.....something they wanted to try and strtch out with. i don't really know what the fuck to make of "panic"! maybe i am hoping that a line-up shuffle is coming and the keyboard player will be shown the door :)

good news i just found right this second!!!!!!!!!

CIRCLE:
USA Tour September 2007 - Dates to be announced soon!

on the Eclipse Booking site http://www.eclipsebooking.com/

nice! one of the best shows I've ever seen was them in full-on krautrockin' judas priest mode about two years ago.

I'm still gonna check out panic but I am a little bummed that they're still coasting by in ambient mode. I mean, I liked miljard and tower, but mostly as background music, you know?

anyway, tyrant is the recent one that I still can't get into. just seems like the type of standard space jams that circle really REALLY don't need to be releasing at this point.

yeah, tyrant is pretty whatever for Circle, good but not spectacular - given the whole 'recorded in a single' day bit and all, it's not too suprising. However, Arkades was the same deal and that one kicks ass, so who knows. Improvisation is hit or miss for anyone, i guess, even the best.

oh jeeze i need to hear way more of these.
i only ever owned pori, but saw them live on their last US tour (which was predominantly with urdog, but urdog didn't play the NY shows. we got mouthus and someone else but i don't remember. good show.)

ian: I think I went to that show too. at the hook w/khanate and psychic paramount, right? I thought everybody else besides circle were pretty boring, actually. psychic paramount were alright but basically played a set I'd already seen em play before note-for-note. khanate and mouthus were a snooze but circle made up for it. loved them.

still not getting into panic

yeah, I finally gave this a listen. meh. nothing out-and-out awful, but very little to get excited about.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I like panic.

Brilliant Colours for Bright Ideas is such a great track that I'm sorely tempted to vote for Zopalki (which is otherwise not close to being my favourite) just for that. Probably the first Circle I heard and I was grabbed by how completely "spacey" it was, not in a cosmic sense but an amazing sense of spatiality, claustrophobia opening out into wide open spaces which fold back in on themselves. Or (sudden realisation of pseudness) oh, whatever.

I wish I could claim to have heard them all, but to be honest I can barely remember which title goes with which album out of the ones I have heard. But Hissi remains a favourite and Miljard is the recent one I was really surprised and delighted by, just when I was beginning to think that I was losing interest in where they were heading.

Tulikoira is the album I tend to listen to most these days actually.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

heh.....set the poll up and then forget to vote .......fawk!

I'm itching to run another Circle poll - how long before it would be valid to do so again? Would enough people care enough to vote to make it meaningful?

do it now, just let it run for at least a few weeks so it gives time for people to listen to some of the 3 million albums before voting

a month might still not be enough though hehe

I'm itching to run another Circle poll - how long before it would be valid to do so again?

Did this ever happen? Been long enough now.

every track on Sunrise is jaw-droppingly great.

today's answer = infektio / rautatie for me

I only clicked on this thread because I thought it was going to be about Circle the short-lived jazz ensemble with Braxton and Corea. Would have voted Paris Concert.

Hissi is my shit

Yeah massaman, I'm with you there. Although I've just had Forest on a few times.

I just did a mixtape as a kind of 'introduction' to Circle but it ended up being largely related projects and hardly touching their 'big' albums. I'll have to do another volume and it will run much deeper, weirder and more hard rocking.

if you like braxton/corea/holland/altschul, you'd probably dig at least "infektio" & "golem/vesiliirto", maybe "tyrant" & "miljard" too.
circle doing judas priest breakdance music with braxton on contrabass sarussaphone would be a dream come true for me

oh, xp.
loving mika rättö's solo disc lately. epic silliness

Okay their new photos are next level

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/18425276_10155268780744431_8899264557151822596_n.jpg?oh=8136e0cf6b4049aafdd106af02c5d80d&oe=597F5D15

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/18402781_10155274833694431_3431479265108427014_n.jpg?oh=92cbeb22f5984224cb075598abc6f10e&oe=5982EE66

Slowly scrolling down seeing the first one I was positive Tuomas Sundae would be at the bottom of that pic.

Tulikoira has only grown in my estimation. Actually I never looked to see what the title meant until just now.

Is it time for that new album poll get?

*yet

I think I'd rather just see how Liam Fennell would rank all the albums rather than another poll!

Circle (the Finnish band): S/D

Yes, waiting for Liam to post something about Terminal. Kind of an ulterior motive in bumping.

But maybe there isn't that much to say, it's mainly just very very good and expertly consolidates many strands they've played with lately with higher than usual production values. It's also probably the most readily explicable (at least on the surface) Circle record of all.

I love how Sick Child alernates between seven and six beat bars but you hardly notice unless you're counting. And the way the synth arpeggio fades in as Imperiumi heads towards the city with a series of key changes, and those double claps punctuating the riff!

The 'proggy' bits on Rautatie are often weirder and more unhinged, here they are encased in more recognisable hard rock shell.

Also good to see Jussi shout out Cardiacs in a couple of interviews, although I did know they are fans. Not that Circle have ever sounded anything like Cardiacs, except perhaps in some manic moments in their earliest incarnation.

In what have been absolutely unthinkable about 7 or 8 years ago, it has now been three years since a new Circle release. Fortunately there was some new Pharaoh Overlord to tide us over in the meantime, but I could really use some new Circle.

Any ilxors still keeping up with Jussi?

Still no new Circle album, but apparently one is in the works with Richard Dawson. From the description for a cassette only release at Ektro:

Hymiö (“smiley”) is an instrumental cassette by Circle. The band is currently working on a song-based album with Richard Dawson (UK). While anxiously waiting for that yet-untitled studio album, these calm sonic snippets are mere outtakes of the first studio sessions at Musiikkihuone in Pori. Drumless, genre-free happiness and pure joy of afterhours’ exhaustion by the quartet of Dawson-Lehtisalo-Rättö-Westerlund, produced by Tomi Leppänen.

On my first spin of 6, the new Pharaoh Overlord. I don't want to spoil anything, but the conceit here is hilarious so far, just not sure how much replay I'm going to give it.

I listened to Iron Magazine this morning. Sounded better than ever. Need to return to the last Aktor, that seemed good but I've only given it a single go. Checking out 6 now and enjoying it and also I see what you mean, though I rarely regret buying their stuff.

Oh man this new Pharaoh Overlord is exactly what my brisk walk needed

Opening track especially

One thing I like about Sunrise is that the first track is a heavy rocker, followed by a quiet pastoral folk song, and from there the tracks flit back between the two styles, except the rock songs become slower and weirder, and the quieter tracks become krautier and dronier, until they both converge in the final track ("Lokki"). Maybe that wasn't the intended structure for the album but that's how I hear it. I love that album so much.

just put on the new Pharaoh Overlord.. lol these guys are nuts

this album is so amazing

Listening now. Its p cool but Antti Boman >>>>>>> Aaron Turner

That said, they've come some way since Zero; I'm liking this more tbrr

album is a huge grower ime, repeat listens have turned my personal rating from a 7 to a 9

so glad that this record has materialized

https://www.sonofmarketing.com/2020/12/02/my-awesome-guest-list-pharaoh-overlord

so that's my new listening sorted for the weekend

this album just gets better every time I hear it

Maybe this is old news to some of you, but poking around the Domino bandcamp page, I see that they've got a collaborative album with Richard Dawson due out in November, Henki.

some further info, apparently just announced today:

Richard Dawson is the diminutive Geordie troubadour whose moving songs have been described as state-of-the-nation addresses, even — or perhaps especially — when he’s singing about pre-medieval peasants. Circle are the genre-straddling pioneers of The New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal, known for wearing spandex or dead fish onstage and singing in a made-up language.

Together they are… Richard Dawson & Circle! Today, we are pleased to announce news of their collaborative album Henki, due November 26th via Weird World. Their epic joint record might seem a departure to those who are most familiar with Dawson from recent solo albums like 2017’s Peasant and 2020 (released in 2019). In fact, Henki fits comfortably into the bigger picture of two acts who have always strived for uninhibited originality.

The first track to be shared from Henki is “Lily”—less directly botanic and more about the ghostly visions experienced by Dawson’s mother when she worked as a nurse in Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary. “Lily”’s video, directed by Mika Taanila, features Richard Dawson challenging snooker hero Steve Davis to a tense game, even if we’re quite sure how the result will pan out. The video receives its world premiere today via World Snooker—the site's first-ever music video feature. Watch it below.

Dawson explains the album’s title: “The word 'henki' roughly translates as 'spirit'. It's a very rich word, supple in its meaning in the same way as the Geordie 'canny'; difficult to pin down.” True to its name, while Henki is influenced in part by heavy metal bands, it does not sound like any metal album you will have heard before. For one thing, few metal albums are filled with songs about plants. Each of Henki’s seven tracks deal with special plants throughout history, inspired by Circle’s guitarist Janne Westerlund instructing the group during recording to be less straightforward and more “like a plant.” He elaborates: “full of irregularities and unexpected details, and still they have an identifiable form…an organic growth within a certain shape.”

As mutual fans of each other, Circle and Dawson originally hit it off via Twitter, which led to Dawson being invited to accompany Circle for their set at Helsinki’s Sideways Festival in 2019. Dawson recalls the moment: “It was like being a teenager and suddenly being asked to go onstage with Iron Maiden. That’s how important this band are to me.” Having pulled that off, they started exchanging demos before they finally got in a room together to set off on their journey proper. Most of the recording took place in Pori—a fine jewel of a city on Finland's balmy west coast—across several visits, the last being in late January 2020 just as Covid-19 first reached Europe. From there, they had to finish Henki remotely, via waves of pure thought beamed across the dark dividing oceans betwixt them, and email.

Easily the greatest flora-themed hypno-folk-metal record you’ll hear this year, Henki adds an electrifying new chapter to the remarkable story of each act, marking the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

Circle, described as "the world’s greatest band - in every category” are Pekka Jääskeläinen (guitar), Julius Jääskeläinen (guitar), Jussi Lehtisalo (bass, voice), Mika Rättö (keyboard, voice), Tomi Leppänen (drums) and Janne Westerlund (guitar, voice). Richard Dawson plays guitar and vocals. Henki was mixed by Antti Uusimäki and mastered by Christian Wright.

Can't wait for this.

Whoa, that sounds like a fucking good collab.

This must have been before Katapult came out. That is my favorite in equal parts because it's their most metal record to me, and it's also the one that got me into the band.

Not an especially popular choice that one, I think. Can't say I ever loved it - I prefer live versions of some of the songs.

The single from the new one is in sort of Rautatie mode which is good with me.

infektio, sunrise, & manner hit it for me

that first track on katapult is something else tho.

Katapult was one of the first handful I ever heard too, so I hold it higher than I probably should. But I dunno, I'm always rediscovering stuff in their albums that make me reevaluate my feelings constantly.

Just had a check on Discogs, including the collabs but excluding cassette-only releases I make this their...47th album? Plus a bunch of singles. And about 15-20 Pharaoh Overlord albums. Also who knows how many other related releases.

I started trying to draw a 'rock family tree' for them (and the various related artists) years ago, but it was super complex and I never got very far.

Oh man, I would love to have seen that!

I'd have loved to have managed to actually draw it, but it very much got the better of me, sadly! It was a fun idea though.

It seems to have stabilised now, but even just tracking the Circle membership in the earlier years was a head scratcher, let alone connecting up all the other acts.

Aside from a low key cassette release last year, 2017's Terminal is still the last Circle-proper album. I think Jussi has released a ton of stuff in that time, though, not to mention the Aktor, four PO albums (plus the instrumental version of PO 6.)

I'd love to see that (attempt at a) family tree!

It's been a long time since I went through my Circle collection, but I think my favorites are Andexelt, Hissi, Alotus, and Sunrise. I used to rate Katapult highly, but I listened to it tonight and tbh found it pretty annoying and half-assed in places. May just not have been in the right mood. Black Black Never Never Land used to be the song I tried introducing friends to Circle with for some reason.

surprised at that alotus. to me it was always the ploddiest one where they don't "go" or achieve lift off in any sense

I dreamed last night that I was watching Circle playing to about 20 people in an attic somewhere along the UK coast. A young, late-60s era Michael Shrieve was on drums. As Michael was about to go into his minimal snare drum solo (that I was very much looking forward to seeing) he was interrupted by Joe Biden, who told me sternly to be less rigid in my beliefs and vote for Keir Starmer. The dream concluded with me being endlessly lectured by Biden on the subject of soft-left politics as the gig ground to a halt around us.

Anyway, best Circle album? Sunrise. Although I can hardly say I've kept up.

I don't even think I can pick a single favorite. It has been relatively quiet on their front lately, so it's been easier to keep up. I've spent a ton of time with Henki, so that might be my current favorite but I'm due another discography run one of these days.

OK so i see i'm not the only person who thought this was about anthony braxton's band with chick corea. i have never heard of a finnish rock band named circle!

if you like braxton/corea/holland/altschul, you'd probably dig at least "infektio" & "golem/vesiliirto", maybe "tyrant" & "miljard" too.
circle doing judas priest breakdance music with braxton on contrabass sarussaphone would be a dream come true for me

― massaman gai, Friday, August 12, 2016 3:33 AM (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

we will see

INFEKTIO sounds Necks-y to me

the vocals are fucking horrible though