Prospekt (2000): A Circle Album and Hawkwind Favorite

Ten Musicians, One Riff

Album cover — rights belong to the original label

Prospekt, released in September 2000 on Ektro Records, is the middle record in the trilogy — bracketed by Andexelt (1999) and Taantumus (2001) — credited with widening Circle's audience beyond Finland for the first time. It was recorded with a 10-piece lineup (Elo, Kontkanen, Laiho, Lehtisalo, Leppänen, Niemelä, Peltomäki, Rättö, Peltola, and Rintala), built around long-form, riff-based tracks indebted to Can and Neu!.

AllMusic gave it four out of five stars. Coverage from The Quietus credits it specifically with helping Circle reach wider international listeners at the turn of the millennium. Maybe the clearest evidence of how far that reach went: Hawkwind's Dave Brock — a genuine krautrock/space-rock elder statesman — named Prospekt among his favorite albums. Later reissues (a 2002 2LP on Static Resonance, then a 2011 pressing on Essence Records) added a bonus track, "Työläisten laulu," recorded live in Jyväskylä on 11 September 2001.

Prospekt is a good entry point if you want to hear Circle at full-band scale, before the catalog splinters into the tighter four-piece era and the dozen side-project detours that followed.

Session Details and Packaging

The album was recorded and mixed in August 2000 by Aki Peltonen, then glass-mastered at CD-Linja Oy before Ektro issued it on CD under catalog number EKTRO-008CD. The ten-name lineup already noted wasn't quite the whole story: Discogs credits a guest listed only as "Köhn" as a featured performer on three of the six tracks — an uncredited-beyond-a-single-name touch that fits a band already comfortable treating its own membership as elastic. The sleeve carried photography by Marjukka Nissi and artwork built around a piece called "Original Glass Object" by Pia Backström.

Six tracks cover a lot of the same instrumental ground Meronia had split fifteen ways ten years earlier: the opener runs 8:22, three more tracks sit in the 6:45-6:55 range, and the record closes by stretching out further with two tracks past the ten-minute mark — over an hour of the long-form, riff-locked writing that drew the Can and Neu! comparisons.

Track by Track

The six-track running order breaks down as "Dedofiktion" (8:22), "Gericht" (6:45), "Stimulance" (6:53), "Varhain" (6:55), "Aarre" (10:17), and "Eripwre" (10:33). Critic Piero Scaruffi, reviewing the album for his History of Rock Music, singled out "Dedofiktion" for a passage where "geometric order is overthrown by a cruising violin and a crescendo of the guitar riff" and "Gericht" for combining "motorik beat, bass drone, guitar noise and gypsy violin." He heard "Stimulance" build tribal rhythm "to a relentless orgasm" and "Varhain" climb "thundering heights of collective noise," and drew comparisons across the record to Captain Beefheart, Gong, Steppenwolf, and the Doors — landing on a 7/10 score. On RateYourMusic, users voted Prospekt into the site's crowdsourced list of 2000's best albums, ranking it #425 overall for the year.

The 2011 Reissue

The 2011 Essence Records reissue (Brazil, catalog ESS017) wasn't a casual repress — the label framed it as a passion project, calling Prospekt "one of Circle's very finest hours ever committed to tape." It came in a tip-on gatefold mini-LP replica sleeve, limited to 800 copies. It carried over the same extended live version of "Työläisten laulu" first heard on the 2002 Static Resonance vinyl, keeping that recording in print for a new generation of listeners rather than commissioning anything new.