Circle on Film: Mika Taanila and Saturnus Reality

Mika Taanila — a real, running partnership

Circle's connection to film runs deeper than a single soundtrack credit. Mika Taanila, a well-known Finnish avant-garde filmmaker, has worked with the band's members repeatedly over more than two decades. In 1998, Circle's side project Ektroverde scored Taanila's Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow, a documentary about the Futuro house. In 2011, Circle performed a live soundtrack to Taanila's 1998 silent-film triptych Pori — released as the album Suur-Pori ("Expanded Pori"). Around 2012, the band recorded new material for another Taanila film, released as the album Six Day Run.

The relationship goes beyond soundtrack work into an actual business partnership: Taanila and Jussi Lehtisalo co-founded Ruton Music, the small label behind several Circle-adjacent releases. In 2017, Lehtisalo and Taanila performed together as PAKASTEET, debuting at Cafe OTO in London alongside Charles Hayward and Bruce Gilbert.

Two documentaries, one about the other

The making of Circle's 2006 album Miljard was filmed by Esko Lönnberg at the Lehtisalo family's mountain cabin — the band's actual rehearsal and recording space — showing Jussi Lehtisalo, Mika Rättö, Janne Westerlund, Tomi Leppänen, and Tuomas Laurila rehearsing, recording, and in quiet moments between takes. It was released as the DVD Saturnus Reality on No Quarter Records. (Sources disagree on the exact release year — Discogs lists 2009, other references say 2007; we're flagging the conflict rather than silently picking one.)

What makes this genuinely unusual: there's a second, separate film — The Man With The Video Camera (2010, Fonal Records, directed by Petri Hagner) — which is a meta-documentary about Lönnberg's own attempt to make Saturnus Reality. A film about making a film about the band, which is about as fitting an artifact as this catalog produces.

Six Day Run and PAKASTEET, in more detail

The 2013 Ektro Records LP Six Day Run collects six tracks — one per "day" — written for Taanila's short film of the same name, itself shot during the real Self-Transcendence Six Day Race, an ultra-endurance event held on a one-mile loop in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York, in April 2012. The music was recorded by Jussi Lehtisalo that September and mixed and mastered separately. The 2017 PAKASTEET performance at Cafe OTO did get a proper release: billed as Taanila, Lehtisalo, Charles Hayward of This Heat, and Bruce Gilbert of Wire, with Gilbert's appearance part of a concert held in memoriam for Mika Vainio, the set was issued as the live LP Molten Salt (2019, Full Contact/Ektro). PAKASTEET's actual debut release was the cassette Pula, put out via Ruton Music the same month as the Cafe OTO show.

Ruton Music itself — the Lehtisalo/Taanila cassette label — was founded in April 2011 and had reached over 40 releases by 2021, distributed almost exclusively through Ektro Records. Beyond Circle and Pharaoh Overlord, its roster notably includes a tape by pioneering Finnish electronic musician and instrument-builder Erkki Kurenniemi. On Saturnus Reality: it had its world premiere at Helsinki's Avanto Festival on November 16–17, 2007 (two evening screenings, both at 19:00), at Kiasma Theatre with an introduction from Taanila himself, and was pitched by programmers as sitting in the tradition of Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. Avanto's own program that year listed the film under its original Finnish title, Ympyrä — literally "Circle," the band's own name — ahead of its later international DVD release as Saturnus Reality; it's the same film under two titles, not a second documentary.

What we couldn't confirm

We found no evidence of a standalone biographical documentary made about Circle itself (as opposed to soundtrack work or footage of a specific recording session), and no notable-director music videos. If that changes, this page will be updated.