Deep Purple - Fireball (1971)

As a pre-teen, learning to play the guitar and bass, I was mostly listening to hard rock, grunge and trash metal bands such as Guns n' Roses, Nirvana Metallica and Megadeath. Around this time, radio started playing Eurotechno and I personally couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to that stuff. Any music that didn't have overdriven guitars sounded a bit lame to me. Then again, the bands I mentioned were going out of fashion and because I didn't like the new stuff that was coming out, I turned my focus on history of metal. My father had old LPs from 70s bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Uriah Heep and these records opened up the world of 60s and 70s rock to me. Deep Purple was one of the heaviest bands of the 70s and also really melodic, which made it really good contender to win me over. They were one of my favourite bands for a few years.

Slowhill - Finndisc (2002)

Slowhill is a Finnish collaboration between Tapani Rinne (his surname means 'Hill' in Finnish) and Vellu Maurola, a.k.a. DJ Slow. The former is a saxophone player known for his experimental ambient jazz band Rinneradio. The latter is a music producer and a DJ. Out of this collaboration comes a really unique sounding album combining jazz, ambient and electronic beats. The album was awarded the Blue Note label as well. This is the first electronica record in Finland to receive such honour. There are some noteworthy appearances on the album as well, such as the hip hop artist Paleface and producer Kalle Chydenius playing the bass. I don't think this album was very well known in Finland, but I can be quite proud of my native country for releasing stuff like this. Sometimes genre mashups can go horribly wrong, but this one is a great success.

Elliott Smith - Figure 8 (2000)

Some people find it strange that Elliott Smith is my all-time favourite artist. I can't really explain it myself, but I just fell in love with his music immediately when I heard his album XO. I get a sense that most Elliott Smith fans consider Either/Or his greatest album, but I personally have always preferred XO and Figure 8, which have a bit more in terms of production and instrumentation. I really love the use of piano in these albums. Now that I've started recording my own music at home, I feel like these albums also provide a strong influence for the sounds that I'm going for in my own recordings. I don't really have a piano or even a keyboard and I'm not that good at playing them either, but I really do like to mix acoustic folk-songs with more modern indie sounds as Elliott Smith has done on these two albums.

Junip - Fields (2010)

Back in the 00's I was a big fan of Swedish-Argentinian singer-songwriter José Gonzáles. I thought it was quite incredible how he could create such beautiful music merely with a nylon string acoustic guitar. There is something amazingly hypnotic in the combination of the classical guitar and Gonzáles' smooth vocals. Junip is Gonzáles' band project. There are more instruments but the feel of the songs is quite similar to his solo stuff. The 70's style rock organs bring fantastic psychedelic elements to his music. Having a band in the background also allows them to add more instrumental hypnotic jams to the songs. I may have a slight preference to Gonzáles' solo albums as there's something truly mystical about the stripped nylon string guitar and his voice, but Junip is still a great spin-off project focusing on the hypnotic qualities of Gonzáles' songs.