Pekko Käppi

Since 2015, Käppi has released three albums with K:H:H:L, in which he was joined by Tommi Laine (guitars) and Nuutti Vapaavuori (bass), along with Jani Auvinen (drums and percussion) for his most recent gigs. The band emerged from the sessions of Rammat Jumalat, “and from the beginning it was clear that the next album would be a band effort.

The second album, Vuonna ’86 (‘In the year ’86’), gave rise to the following critique: “It seems that in Tampere there exists some kind of version of the Star Trekian disturbance in the spacetime continuum. A lot of folk music of other dimensions has originated from there during the last few years. The new release by Pekko Käppi, too, draws partially from the same Ugric marsh as did the fine album Jos ken pahoin uneksii (2007), but from a great many other places as well.”

In 2001 Käppi released his debut record, a four-song EP titled Kalastajia ja kaivostyöläisiä (‘Fishermen and Miners’). It was said that it “brought to one’s mind the field recordings of cultural anthropologists, a breath of air from some mystical past. It had an intriguing atmosphere and at the same time it was aesthetically pleasant.” Since then he has released three more EPs and two albums of collaborations as well as three solo albums and three albums with K:H:H:L.

In 1998, Käppi played in the streets with a friend who played the bagpipe. The sound of the jouhikko could barely be heard, and Käppi felt he needed an amplifier. The device had to be a small one, so he could carry it around, but the result was that he had to crank it up, thus producing a distorted sound. This is how he found his own sound, which has remained almost unchanged ever since then.

In 1997, Käppi got a chance to study folk music in Kaustinen, at the Ala-Könni Folk High School, where he began to play the jouhikko. At the time, he was frustrated with the guitar and felt it had too many strings and too much of everything in general.

In 1993–94, when he was 17 years old, Käppi spent a year in the United States as an exchange student. The son of his host family was a fan of Grateful Dead, and through him Käppi became familiar with the band's music, which consisted of rock and improvised music based on folk music. This provoked his interest in the sources of that music, and especially in Finnish folk music.

Pekko Käppi (born 1976) is a jouhikko musician from Tampere and a part-time teacher at the Sibelius Academy. He is also a composer, a producer and a researcher. He is trained as an ethnomusicologist, specializing in traditional folk music. He performs together with his band K:H:H:L, which stands for ‘the bones of dead horses out of control’.