Ektroverde: The Circle Side Project That Named Ektro Records

The Project That Named a Label

Ektroverde is the least-known of Circle's well-documented side projects, and one of the most historically important — it's where the name "Ektro" comes from. Formed in Pori in 1996 as a sister project sharing members with Circle (Jussi Lehtisalo and Mika Rättö among them, alongside a rotating cast that included Tomi Leppänen, Jyrki Laiho, and others), Ektroverde's debut EP Mortalaattori carries the catalog number EKTRO-002 — one of the earliest known releases on what would become Ektro Records (we could not confirm what, if anything, carried EKTRO-001), the label at the center of most of Circle's later catalog.

A period label bio describes Ektroverde as "a Finnish group of experimental music" whose activity extended beyond ordinary performance into "performances, rituals and happenings" using the logic of conceptual art. Musically, it's been compared to Can, Ash Ra Tempel, Neu!, and Soft Machine — long, improvised, hypnotic jams in the krautrock/post-rock tradition. Notably, Ektroverde scored Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow (1998), a piece by the well-known Finnish avant-garde filmmaker Mika Taanila about the Futuro house — one of several points of overlap between Circle's orbit and Taanila's work.

The project released nine records between 1996 and 2003 across five different labels: the Mortalaattori EP (1996, EKTRO-002), Music for Supermarket (1997, Bad Vugum), Pingvin (1998, Ektro), the Futuro soundtrack (1998, Ektro), Arpeggio (1999, Bad Vugum), a Svart EP (1999, Fonal), a split 7" with Hinageshi Bondage (1999), Integral (2000), and closing with Ukkossalama (2003, Ektro). It's obscure enough that it never reached the mainstream music press, but real genre-specific coverage exists: Aural Innovations' review of Integral called it "difficult to describe, impossible to label, jazz electronica mindfuck music," singling out opener "Harvest" for sliding from a melodic acoustic-prog mode into a lounge-jazzy motif, and "Tractors" for a ten-minute avant-jazz stretch. ProgArchives rates Ukkossalama at 4.5 stars, calling it a highly recommended record built around kraut, jazz, and space ingredients. No source explains why the project folded after that record — that detail stays open rather than guessed at.

The group's own mission statement went beyond the "rituals and happenings" framing already noted — it described a deliberate refusal to work within traditional, accustomed forms of performing music, building shows instead around the logic of conceptual art, investigating the act of performance itself. One show from that era is still documented and circulates today: a recording of a gig at Pori's Nuorisotalo, captured on the November 1998 Oulu/Pori tour leg.