Onkiniemi Ateljee is a cultural space established in a disused knitting factory in 2020, at a time when the COVID pandemic had been raging for roughly half a year. Globally, countermeasures to the disease and the threat it posed were varied, but the effects were universal. Communal rituals, such as live music gatherings, became rarer or changed in nature. The most you could do was put a record on while boiling masks in the evenings.



Every now and then I’ve heard people speak of experimental or otherwise exciting music as something one is “exposed to”. By the spring of -22 gathering together in Onkiniemi’s autonomous Habbo Hotel was once again a relaxed affair. The sound lived in the box-shaped confines of the atelier, splashed forth like warm water and upon reaching living ears foamed like hand soap. On that April Fool’s Day Oiro Pena’s playing would’ve moved anyone from Tokyo to Torino to Tohmajärvi alike. That’s how small the world is at best.



Let us be exposed!



- Ville Väisänen, one of the evening's organizers



The gig itself was like a sort of rabbit hole. The band dynamic was so dense that for a moment the walls of the venue became meaningless. But the atelier definitely added to the experience. Everything was so close and cozy that the band’s furious playing formed the rhythm for an inner journey to places I didn’t know existed in the Finnish jazz scene. The show held me in its grip right to the end, the sound shifting in an interesting manner as the players themselves were twisted about by their mutual intensity. There’s something really organic about what Oiro Pena are doing, the music is clearly built upon a respect for the sound, occurring exclusively within the moment. You can hardly say that the band performs, and it was really interesting to witness them move from one tangent to another in a way that was at times free-form, but with a constant sense of togetherness. Great gig!

–Noora Vienola